Un-stating order: The Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria

This thesis asks how we can make sense of the popular characterisation of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) as a state-making project despite explicit rejections that this is the case from the Administration, who claim instead to be crafting an alternative, nonstatist vision of governance based on ‘democratic autonomy’. Through discourse analysis of key political theoretical texts and political practices within the AANES, I show how adherents of democratic autonomy reject three key statist discourses: the centralisation of authority and the necessity of monopolised legitimate force for stability; liberalism (secularism, Western feminism); and capitalism. Using my translations of Abdullah Öcalan’s works of political theory, and of articulations by female fighters and activists in the region, the thesis argues that AANES discourses on non-state armed groups and foreign fighters, on sectarian and gendered violence, and on political economy and the environment, all propose compelling challenges to the widely presumed requirements for order and democracy. Nevertheless, the thesis argues that the power of external discourses that recognise AANES as ‘state-like’ help to constitute it as such, both by making possible the activities that have rendered AANES more state-like over time, and by narrowing the space from which alternatives to statehood may be articulated. The thesis therefore provides an account of why ‘nonstate’ revolutions, such as that in AANES, may be short-lived, by demonstrating the disciplinary role played by a statist international order, which re-enacts itself by re-shaping non-state polities in states’ image.