Reorienting the PKK: Rojava and the political thought of Abdullah Öcalan

Speaker: Joost Jongerden, Wageningen University Chair: Robert Lowe, LSE Middle East Centre In its 1978 manifesto, the PKK declared the establishment of an independent state to be the most important political goal of any national liberation movement. Twenty years on, the party’s leader Abdullah Öcalan changed this when he developed an ideological framework based on the idea of self-governing, stateless societies as the best way of addressing socio-economic and socio-cultural injustices. Joost Jongerden explains this paradigm shift, which reoriented the PKK as well as other Kurdish movements in the Middle East. Recorded on 12 October 2017. Image credit: Nora Miralles, Flickr.