Beyond postcolonial heteronomy: Kurdish question, decolonisation, and the relational time of democratic confederalism

Sara Kermanian

Third World Quarterly, 2025, vol. 46, issue 11, 1305-1323

Abstract: Abdullah Öcalan’s theory of democratic confederalism, emerging from the Kurdish anti-colonial struggle against the states of Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria, diverges from a postcolonial framework by centring on social ecology. This paper argues that Öcalan’s approach signifies a rejection of the ‘heteronomy’ of postcolonial theory’s ‘dualist imaginary’, which reduces the interactive agencies shaping societies’ transformation to those implicated in the West–Rest binary. This binarism perpetuates a ‘ruptured’ understanding of non-Western political histories and a dualist notion of ‘unevenness’ that either neglects ‘inter-subaltern’ hierarchical relations – including colonial ones – or distorts their historical and agential roots. Öcalan’s theory, addressing the Kurdish condition as a constellation of fragmented ‘inter-subaltern’ colonies, implies a rejection of heteronomy both analytically and normatively. Analytically, it highlights the simultaneous transformation of state institutions and statelessness through intersocietal interactions, illuminating how the ‘unevenness of possibilities’ influences interactive transformations. Normatively, it aims to address the ‘uneven possibilities’ for ‘interactive’ political ‘doing’ and ‘alterations’, empowering suppressed ‘otherness’ through ‘interactive autonomy’. These proposals promote a relational and interactive understanding of time, framed around the core notion of ‘time as possibility’, which is crucial for advancing a relational international ontology and a decolonising perspective beyond the obstacle of heteronomy.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2024.2427193

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