How to build real peace

A fascinating essay exploring how Kurdish cooperatives have manifested Rojava starting in 2014, and how it has restored some normalization of peace in a region still undergoing active warfare.

Upon my arrival, what I found most immediately striking was not the scale of the project but the transformation of everyday time. In Rojava, people typically work until 2.30 pm, return home to eat and rest, then go out again at 5 pm – not to work more hours, but to take part in an assembly: of the cooperative, the commune, the women’s congress or the municipality, where everyone debated and made decisions about their neighbourhood, their communities, their families. Almost no one chose to stay at home.

Equally central to the project was its feminist dimension. Rojava’s social economy is based on a principle that mainstream economics – and most Left movements – have historically ignored: reproductive and care work, performed predominantly by women, is not a secondary complement to the economy, but its foundation.

The rhythm of life I observed in Rojava – working until 2.30-3 pm, then going to the assemblies – is precisely what capitalism denies to most people in the world, not just those living in conflict zones. The urban worker who leaves home before dawn and returns at night, too exhausted to speak with their children; the woman whose care work is invisible to the economy and the state, who never rests because her work never ends; the debt-ridden professional who works to pay for what they need to keep working; the young person who sees no horizon in the future; the children who grow up without spaces to play. All of them experience forms of violence that have no name in peace debates but are deeply felt in daily life.