History Bites · 8 min read
In the middle of one of the most devastating conflicts of the 21st century, something unexpected was being built. In the autonomous region of Rojava — also known as the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria — Kurdish, Arab, Assyrian, and other communities were constructing a cooperative economy from the ground up, under conditions of war, blockade, and extraordinary hardship. What they built is not perfect. But it is real. And it offers lessons that reach far beyond the Middle East.
2012 — Rojava autonomous administration established · 3 cantons self-governing across northern Syria · Cooperatives the backbone of the economic model
What Is Rojava?
Rojava — meaning “the West” in Kurdish — is the informal name for the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), a self-governing region that emerged in 2012 as the Syrian civil war created a power vacuum in the Kurdish-majority areas of northern Syria.
The region is governed through a system of nested democratic councils — from the village level up to the regional level — and is home to a diverse population of Kurds, Arabs, Assyrian Christians, Yazidis, and others. It is not a Kurdish state. It is a multi-ethnic autonomous administration that explicitly rejects ethnic nationalism in favor of what its theorists call “democratic confederalism.” (Rojava — Wikipedia)
The intellectual foundation of Rojava’s political and economic system comes largely from the writings of Abdullah Öcalan — the imprisoned Kurdish political leader whose thinking drew heavily on American anarchist theorist Murray Bookchin and his concept of libertarian municipalism. Bookchin’s ideas — direct democracy, ecological economics, communal ownership — became the blueprint for Rojava’s cooperative economy. (Democratic confederalism — Wikipedia)
The PKK is designated as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the European Union, the United States, and several other countries. (U.S. Department of State: Foreign Terrorist Organizations · Council of the European Union: EU terrorist list — verify current listings, since these are periodically updated)
Rojava’s governing institutions — organized today as the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) — are formally distinct from the PKK, with their own legislative and executive councils. But the relationship is genuinely contested: the AANES grew out of the PYD (Democratic Union Party) and its armed wing, the YPG, both of which share personnel, ideology, and — Turkey alleges — material support with the PKK. Turkey, in particular, treats the AANES as an extension of the PKK; other observers see it as a distinct political project that draws on Öcalan’s ideas without being organizationally subordinate to the party he founded. Readers should know this is disputed, not settled. (Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria — Wikipedia)
The Economic Model: Democratic Confederalism in Practice
Rojava’s economic system is explicitly neither state socialism nor capitalism. Its Social Contract declares that the economy should serve the community, not extract from it.
Three principles organize the economic model:
1. Cooperative Ownership. Private enterprise is permitted in Rojava, but the preferred and promoted form of economic organization is the cooperative. The administration actively supports the formation of worker and community cooperatives across all sectors. The cooperative is not just an economic unit in Rojava. It is a political one — each cooperative is also a unit of democratic self-governance.
2. Community Economy. The Kongreya Star — the women’s congress — and the TEV-DEM both operate cooperative economic networks that support women’s economic independence and community self-sufficiency. Women’s cooperatives are central to Rojava’s economic model — not as a special program but as a structural requirement.
3. Ecological Economics. Rojava’s economic model prioritizes food sovereignty, renewable energy, and sustainable land use over extractive growth.
The Agricultural Cooperatives: Food Sovereignty in a War Zone
In a region under blockade, surrounded by conflict, food sovereignty is not an abstract principle. It is a survival strategy.
Agricultural cooperatives in Rojava collectively own and operate wheat, barley, and vegetable production across hundreds of thousands of hectares, share equipment that no individual farmer could afford alone, distribute surplus to community members, preserve traditional seed varieties, and operate community grain storage ensuring food security at the community level.
By maintaining collective agricultural production under conditions of war and blockade, Rojava’s cooperative farms have achieved something extraordinary: food security for a population of millions in one of the most unstable regions on earth.
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The Women’s Cooperatives: Jineolojî in Practice
Every cooperative has mandatory women’s co-leadership — no cooperative can be governed exclusively by men. The Kongreya Star operates its own cooperative economic network including agricultural cooperatives, textile workshops, and service enterprises governed entirely by women. Women’s communes function as the base unit of both political governance and economic organization at the village level.
This is not tokenism. It is a structural redesign of economic power — built into the legal and organizational architecture of every cooperative enterprise in the region.
The Production Centers and Workshops
Community production centers are collectively owned workshops that provide shared manufacturing infrastructure, training and skill development, and value-added processing — transforming raw agricultural products into finished goods within the community rather than exporting raw materials to be processed elsewhere.
The Honest Assessment: Challenges and Contradictions
Ongoing Conflict. Rojava exists in an active war zone. Turkish military operations, ISIS remnants, Syrian government pressure, and complex relationships with multiple international actors create conditions of profound instability that constrain economic development.
Blockade. The region has been subject to economic blockades from multiple directions — limiting access to imports, exports, and international financial systems.
Oil Revenue Questions. Rojava sits on significant oil reserves. How that revenue is managed is a subject of ongoing debate and incomplete transparency.
Scale and Sustainability. Many cooperative enterprises in Rojava operate at subsistence or near-subsistence levels. The transition to genuinely thriving worker-owned enterprises requires stability and capital that the ongoing conflict makes difficult to accumulate.
These challenges are real. But they are arguments for the difficulty of building cooperative economies under conditions of war and blockade — not arguments against cooperative economics itself.
“What is being built in Rojava is not a finished model. It is a work in progress — a genuine attempt, under extraordinarily difficult conditions, to put cooperative and democratic principles into economic practice. The attempt itself is instructive, regardless of its imperfections.”
The Theoretical Roots: Bookchin and Democratic Confederalism
Murray Bookchin’s libertarian municipalism argued for nested democratic assemblies, communal ownership of productive resources, ecological economics, and the municipality as the primary unit of economic organization.
These ideas were adopted and adapted by Abdullah Öcalan and are now being implemented — imperfectly, under fire, but genuinely — in the cooperatives, communes, and councils of northern Syria. This makes Rojava the world’s largest real-world experiment in Bookchinist cooperative economics.
The Connection to the Broader Cooperative Tradition
Rojava’s cooperative economy sits within the same global tradition as every other cooperative experiment in this series — the same democratic governance as Mondragon, the same crisis-born cooperative formation as Argentina’s recovered factories, and the same ecological commitment found in energy cooperatives worldwide.
The cooperative impulse is universal. It emerges wherever people have the space — however constrained — to organize their economic lives around solidarity rather than extraction.
Rojava is proof that this impulse survives even war.
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This is part of our History Bites series — bite-sized stories from the history of cooperative and solidarity economics. Want more? Join the Solidarity Economy platform and be part of building it.
Written by the Cooperative Codebase team — Aaron, Israel, and Jamie. Part of the Solidarity Economy Marketplace. Last updated: July 2026.
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