How can our movement cultivate a deeper understanding of class solidarity and regional autonomy that challenges nationalist tendencies within our context, without falling into the trap of reforming or reinforcing existing state structures, while still recognizing the importance of respecting diversity and local self-governance?
Nationalism seduces because it promises instant unity yet leaves class hierarchy untouched. Begin by mapping who extracts value from your oilfields, checkpoints and markets. When Turkish security firms and Kurdish landlords appear on the same flow chart, the ethnic narrative fractures and a class one emerges.
Root that discovery in federated councils where delegates arrive as workers, farmers and renters—not as Kurds, Arabs or Yezidis. Rotate languages, meeting sites and facilitation so diversity becomes lived practice, not slogan. Assign each council a livelihood project—seed banks, strike funds, women-run clinics—binding autonomy to material survival instead of to future constitutions.
Militarisation breeds new elites. Keep defence strictly auxiliary: community militias answerable to the assembly and subject to instant recall. Power that can be recalled cannot harden into a proto-state.
Trade nationalist symbols for ecological ones: murals of shared rivers, folk festivals that honour soils rather than borders. The story shifts from ethnic destiny to regional commons, from flag worship to class collaboration.
What nationalist ritual are you willing to abandon first so confederal reality can finally breathe?
Reflecting on the last exchange, I realize that shifting our movement’s narrative away from ethnic identity toward class and regional solidarity might threaten deeply ingrained symbols and rituals that reinforce our collective identity. This tension between preserving our cultural heritage and fostering a broader, anti-nationalist ethos feels urgent. How can we intentionally deconstruct or reframe these nationalist symbols in ways that honor our diversity while emphasizing our shared material interests and regional autonomy?
Begin with a public archival ritual: gather banners, songs and myths that evoke the Kurdish nation and lay them on communal tables beside rent receipts, water bills and wage slips. Invite storytellers, not politicians, to narrate how each symbol arose and whose material interests it now serves. By exposing lineage you loosen emotional grip. Next, practice creative détournement. Re-stitch the sunburst flag into patchwork quilts that travel with mobile seed libraries, letting the symbol warm households while its meaning migrates from ethnic pride to regional care. Recompose traditional marching songs with new verses that praise cooperatives, not frontiers. Schedule festivals where every dance group must pair a heritage step with an improvisation that reflects contemporary class struggles. The twist signals living culture rather than frozen identity. When elders fear erasure, remind them that true continuity depends on adaptability; ritual that refuses to evolve becomes a museum piece cherished only by the state. Which cherished emblem are you ready to remix until it sings of commons rather than borders?
In what ways can we facilitate collective storytelling and artistic practice that honor our diverse histories while actively reshaping symbols into expressions of shared material interests and regional solidarity?
Stage “History-for-Tomorrow circles” in village squares and city cafés. Each participant brings one ancestral object and one artefact of daily survival—a loom shuttle beside a prepaid electricity card. Facilitators weave the paired stories into a single oral tapestry, tracing threads from past rebellions to present rent struggles. Record the sessions, then remix the audio over downtempo bağlama loops broadcast on guerrilla radio, letting listening itself become a collective rehearsal of new identity.
Commission roving mural brigades that exchange icons rather than impose them. A Yazidi peacock, an Assyrian sun and a miners’ pickaxe intertwine over abandoned checkpoints, turning contested walls into canvases of shared livelihood. Make the painting process public: pass the brush every five minutes so authorship disperses along class lines, not ethnic borders.
Launch a regional zine printed on flour-sack paper distributed with bread deliveries. Each issue pairs a folktale with a ledger-style infographic exposing who profits from checkpoints, pipelines or land seizures. Story and statistic rub against each other until readers feel ownership of both culture and economy.
Which story-object pairing would you bring to the next circle, and why?
Reflecting on how storytelling and artistic practices can foster shared material interests amid diversity, I see a tension between individual histories and collective identities. How might we design these storytelling spaces so that participants feel empowered to express their unique histories while also contributing to a collective narrative that challenges division and promotes regional solidarity?
Design the space like a breathing lung: inhale the singular, exhale the collective. Begin with concentric circles. In the inner ring each person offers a three-minute “seed story” anchored in a tactile object. The rule is simple: end your tale by naming one material thread it shares with everyday survival, be that debt, water, or land. Listeners in the outer ring harvest these threads on butcher paper, sketching a live map of overlapping needs.
Rotate roles; scribes become speakers, speakers become listeners. This continual exchange chips away at hierarchy and keeps the atmosphere experimental. Conclude with a synthesis round where facilitators read the map back aloud, transforming isolated experiences into a unified plotline of regional autonomy. Capture the moment with instant art: silkscreen the newly forged symbols onto cloth scraps brought by participants, creating a patchwork banner that grows session by session.
By ritualising reciprocity—story offered, commonality returned—you safeguard individuality while fusing it into a movement narrative that targets shared material levers instead of ethnic fault lines.
Which sensory ritual will you introduce so that every solitary voice vibrates inside the collective lung?