This seminar is part of series of seminars, jointly developed with the University of Rojava, with the aim to enable conversations among students of the universities of Bremen and Rojava. This time, the seminar will be part of the summer school of the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Rojava on decolonisation.
The idea of the seminar is to engage with struggles for decolonization, and their similarities and differences in varying contexts. What different understandings of decolonization exist? And which struggles frame themselves around claims and practices to decolonize social, political and even spatial orders? What does decolonization mean in the light of Germany’s colonial history and its social, political and economic legacies? And how, on the other hand, is the term used in the text of the Kurdish Movement?
North-Eastern Syria – also often referred to as Rojava – is currently site of one of the most interesting attempts to challenge the idea of the nation-state, in our times. Despite the war and constant attacks, the people in Rojava are trying to establish a different way of living together inspired by ideas of grassroots democracy, feminism, and ecologically sustainability. In this way, the model of autonomy being put into practice in Rojava in fact provides an alternative to national independence in the struggle against – what Kurdish movements have framed as – “internal colonialism” in/by the states Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran [which were born out of the end of the Ottoman and Qajar Empires].
This seminar wants to investigate what understandings of colonialization are these different struggles for decolonization based on. It asks what these movements tackle. Is decolonization a question of repatriation and restitution of objects and land? A question of reversing decades or centuries of economic damage? Or is it about shattering logics, discourses and political orders of superiority? Do they aim at destabilizing/disturbing existing certainties or rather about erecting/establishing new changed conditions? And how do these struggles engage with questions of the past, contemporary and future?
The seminar is divided into two parts: one preparational and one joint seminar part. The first part has the aim to give some background knowledge to the situation in Rojava, the history of the Kurdish Question, and to discuss key issues on collaborative learning, as well as to prepare presentations on struggles of decolonialization in the German context, which you will hold in the second – joint – part of the seminar.
As this seminar is a research-based seminar, we do not provide a finished syllabus. Instead, together with the participants, we will decide which topics to address. We therefore ask the participants to actively engage in the shaping of the seminar. The seminar will be held in a combination of English, German and Kurdish. Knowledge of Kurdish, Turkish, Arabic or Farsi is helpful, but not a requirement for this seminar. Simultaneous translation of and to Kurdish will be provided in the collaborative work. [The [joint part of the] seminar will be held online/hybrid.??]
Convenors: Münevver Azizoğlu Bazan (Uni Bremen), Götz Bachmann (Uni Bremen), Ulrike Flader (Uni Bremen), Sardar Saadi (Uni Rojava).