Reviewing ‘Statelet of Survivors’ by Amy Austin Holmes

Statelet of Survivors: The Making of a Semi-Autonomous Region in Northeast Syria, a new book-length look at the establishment, evolution, and achievements of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) by academic Dr. Amy Austin Holmes, takes up two important challenges.

First, Holmes’ observations based on hundreds of interviews conducted throughout North and East Syria (NES) enable her to challenge some of the received binaries which characterise analyses of the political movement which began with the ‘Rojava Revolution.’ Is this a quasi-state  or a decentralized grassroots revolution? A Kurdish-nationalist project, or a feminist utopia? An oil economy, or a network of cooperatives? As Holmes suggests, these apparent contradictions can themselves point to the reasons behind the AANES’ unexpected success and ‘survival.’

Second, where possible, Holmes then strives to prove these points with reference to statistics and surveys collected and conducted during her field research. As might be expected in an unrecognized, isolated region which has endured over a decade of war since the partial collapse of Syrian state governance, gathering concrete data in NES can prove difficult. To cite one famous example, the fact there is no generally agreed-upon figure for the region’s population speaks to the scale of the challenge. Figures provided by the region’s Autonomous Administration sharply diverge from UN tallies, while a formal census conducted back in 2016 never saw the light of day. Though Holmes must necessarily reckon with this type of challenge, her work marks an important effort to quantify some familiar claims over the AANES’ achievements, helping to clarify arguments which are too often left unsubstantiated.

Fresh and Familiar Narratives

Some sections of ‘Survivors’ offer narratives which are more or less familiar to those who have long followed the evolution of the Rojava Revolution. For example, her initial account here of how the militant Kurdish movement proved ready to respond to the collapse of Syrian state governance to implement the ideology of ‘democratic confederalism’ first in Kurdish regions, and then throughout swathes of northern Syria, is relatively straightforward.

Even these points, though, bear repeating. Throughout ‘Survivors’, one of Holmes’ key aims is to introduce and explain the policies and practices of the AANES to an institutional US audience. By placing the spotlight on the way in which the majority of Syria’s Yezidi minority has transformed from marginalisation under the Assad regime and the constant threat of ethnic cleansing to a degree of formal recognition, representation and protection previously unseen in their history, she offers a case study as to why US Republicans and Democrats alike should support and engage with the AANES.

Likewise, her account of how the AANES has prioritized developing its own educational system responds to common criticisms of the Administration as ‘imposing’ a secular, progressive, Öcalan-influenced school curriculum, making clear both the pragmatic necessity of the AANES’ efforts, and their significance from the perspective of international institutions who claim to prioritize women’s and universal education rights.

On other points, though, Holmes takes a more unexpected tack. One of the freshest chapters here is an opening section in which she compares the AANES’ multi-ethnic federation to the earlier Ararat Rebellion against the new Republic of Turkey, which reached its peak in 1930. As Holmes carefully shows, an event commonly represented as a doomed-to-fail flash-in-the-pan uprising by backwards Kurds actually lasted the best part of a decade and featured collaboration between Kurds and Assyrian Christians. Unfortunately, this important uprising often remains obscured from historical accounts, so very few people are aware that it featured women’s participation and saw the establishment of functioning quasi-state institutions across a significant territory.

Differences notwithstanding, on all these points, the Ararat Rebellion provides an unexpected and useful point of comparison to the AANES. Indeed, the survivors of these failed 20^th century uprisings were among those who were driven south by Turkish repression into modern-day Rojava, becoming the literal forebears of later revolutionary movements.

Here and elsewhere, Holmes tries to debunk myths of Kurdish exceptionalism, emphasising the long-term multi-ethnic nature of political activity in northern Syria (though, as Professor Thomas Schmidinger has shown, this history also featured a 20^th-century history of intercommunal violence between Kurds and Christians). As she tells KCS: “If you simply see [the AANES] as a Kurdish region or movement, that’s too narrowly focused to understand the complexity of the present and past of the semi-autonomous region… This cooperation between Kurd and Christians is not something which happened in 2012, or just because the US was involved.”

By correctly situating the AANES as the heir of and arguably the only successful outcome of the so-called ‘Arab Spring’, or offering another useful case-study of the strong and independent-Arab military and political movement in the AANES-governed city of Manbij, Holmes ensures the Rojava Revolution is understood in its complex, multi-ethnic, Middle Eastern context. Speaking to KCS, she draws an intriguing parallel between the AANES’ current attempt to hold municipal elections and the catastrophe which followed Egypt’s first elections after its own pro-democratic revolution, arguing that the years’ experience of governance in northern Syria put the AANES in a unique position to follow through on implementing a legitimate democratic process. As such, ‘Survivors’ has something to offer both the Western or international reader engaging with the Kurdish-led revolution in northern Syria for the first time and those who have spent years following, reading about, and working on the revolution.

Statistics of Survivors

Holmes attempts to set her work apart from previous histories and assessments of the AANES through regular reference to surveys and basic statistical analyses. Again, these mark an important effort to justify and quantify the AANES’ achievements to an international audience, suggesting directions which other researchers could follow and develop.

Given the challenges above and the broader difficulties which face a one-woman research team trying to cover an entire region home to millions of people, these statistics are fairly broad-brush in nature. But even where they are simply setting self-reported AANES statistics or making claims against themselves, for example, in showing the number of provisions in the various manifestations of the AANES’ constitution (or ‘Social Constitution’) aimed at protecting gender rights, these stats can still play a useful role in showing how the AANES understands itself, or demonstrating change over time.

Likewise, statistics showing that a majority of rank-and-file members of the AANES’ military wing in the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) are now Arabs rather than Kurds, or that a majority of these rank-and-file members have never read Abdullah Öcalan’s work, do not necessarily directly disprove the critical claim that the SDF is dominated by a Kurdish political cadre. But again, these figures suggest directions toward challenging claims made by pro-Turkish lobbyists on the basis of scanty evidence, by subjecting the AANES’ ideological claims to the statistical test.

This statistical approach is at its most effective when Holmes compares the AANES to the very states and international institutions apt to criticise the administration for its perceived failings. For example, she shows that female representation in the AANES and SDF not only outstrips the relevant UN benchmarks, but far outperforms the UN itself! When the researcher records that “in 2015, only 3% of UN military peacekeepers and 10% of UN police personnel were women, considerably lower than even the modest UN target of 20%,” whereas “that same year, an estimated 30% of the SDF were women,” the tart note of criticism is refreshing.

Statistics on women’s representation might not tell the whole story, but even on this internationally recognized metric, the AANES is outstripping its international detractors. Ultimately, the aim here is again to contextualise the AANES’ efforts and achievements in terms of how they can achieve international traction. While supporters of the Kurdish women’s movement might bristle at the comparison, for example, Holmes smartly points out the AANES’ Women’s Law in fact repeats several key points from Turkey’s Civil Code, “which also outlaws child marriage and polygamy.” (So why is Turkey kicking up such a fuss?) Or again, the militant Kurdish movement’s track record of conflict with NATO member Turkey notwithstanding, Holmes stresses the fact that this movement has “never launched any notable attacks on the American military bases scattered across Turkey—including those in the Kurdish regions in the southeast.”

As Holmes tells KCS, “There are other parts of the world where the USA has been involved in a conflict, but then did not support the creation of governance structures and power vacuums that have emerged that have been ungoverned, which is usually a recipe for instability or other malign actors to take advantage.” In this respect, Statelet is intended to offer a resource to policymakers and institutions that speak the language of UN targets, state governance, and the ‘rules-based international order’, demonstrating the validity and legitimacy of the AANES’ governance.

Statelet of Contradictions

In this respect, Statelet attempts to show the AANES is operating in line with international norms and standards. But many readers will be equally interested in how the AANES diverges from these norms – that is, in a fresh assessment of the extent to which the AANES’ claims to model a genuine, systemic alternative to nation-state governance in the Middle East are justified by the facts on the ground.

In what is perhaps the book’s most crucial line, Holmes writes:

“Herein lies a contradiction, but also the very secret to [the AANES] success. In order to survive and manage the territory under SDF control, state-like structures were created—despite their ideology that rejects statehood.”

In fields from the economy to managing community grievances to women’s liberation to the battlefield, she shows that whatever the AANES’ more utopian aspirations, they have necessarily been required to adopt (some of) the same practices, provide the same services, and guarantee the same security and living standards as a state government. As she tells KCS, “Despite the ideology of democratic confederalism and talking about wanting to create a stateless democracy, the reality of the situation in Syria required that someone filled the vacuum after Assad withdrew in 2012.”

Often, the result is a pragmatic hybrid, which departs from the brutal, centralised practices of the Assad regime while still necessarily collecting taxes, policing the streets, and trading with neighbouring powers. Holmes’ assessment of the region’s economy is particularly lucid, echoing recent critical work by Azize Aslan in arguing that “the leaders of the region have tried to transform their weaknesses—the externally-imposed underdevelopment and relative lack of exposure to capitalism—to their benefit in order to establish a unique economic ecosystem.”

Here, as elsewhere, de facto conditions of statelessness and the military and economic pressures exerted by neighbouring states undeniably take their toll. But they also force and encourage the AANES to seek out novel solutions to the crises it faces, rather than defaulting to the tried-and-failed practices of other regional states.

Some supporters of the AANES and its aspirations to supersede state governance might baulk at the slightly pejorative designation ‘statelet’, with its implications of Balkanisation and the replication of state logic in microcosm. But it is also possible to read the term another way – as bound up with the AANES’ unexpected ‘survival’. Rather than supplanting the state overnight, as Holmes’ thoughtful reflections make clear, the AANES is engaged in a long, complex process of extricating itself from Assad’s brutal governance and establishing an alternative, which seeks to reject the chauvinist, nationalist, centralist logic exemplified by Assad while also meeting or exceeding the standards of security and quality of life offered by regional state governments.

In this daunting task, the ‘statelet of survivors’ deserves both material support from the USA and other international actors who claim to seek a resolution to the contemporary crisis in the Middle East, and further critical engagement by academics, journalists and researchers seeking to understand the complex realities of a truly unique model of governance. Statelet of Survivors can contribute to both.