Joost Jongerden
In its 1978 manifesto, the PKK declared the establishment of an independent state to be the only correct political goal of a national liberation movement. Around the turn of the millennium, following a critique and self-critique on the character of national liberation struggles and “real existing socialism”, the party started to question whether independence really ought to be conceptualized and practiced in the form of state construction (Jongerden 2016). Taking the concept of state-construction from the principle of self‑determination, the PKK started to develop an ideological architecture on the basis of the idea of self-government as a stateless society and thence to address socioeconomic and sociocultural injustices (Fraser and Honneth 2003; Nilsson 2008).

2In the PKK’s “new paradigm”, as it was named, the construction of gender hierarchies and the state are considered to have been historically at the foundation of both economic and cultural injustices. Turning the thesis of Marie Mies and Veronica Bennholdt‑Thomsen (1988) on its head, Abdullah Öcalan (2013) argued that social inequalities and cultural injustices started with the emergence of gender-hierarchies and the identification of women with the domestic sphere (“housewifization”) in the Neolithic era, referring to women as “the first colony” or “the oldest from of slavery’ related to a process of state formation. This article looks at the paradigm change as it emerged in the 2000s, taking the idea of stateless democracy and gender-equality as two key dimensions of this..[1]
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