Some 40 million people. Some 40 years of bloodshed. The Kurds are the largest nation in the world without a state and official international recognition. The World Wars, which arguably emerged as a result of the pathologies of Western imperialism and paved the way for a bipolar world order between the United States and Soviet Union for decades, left the Kurdish people at the mercy of the treaties of Sèvres (1920) and Lausanne (1923), which initially promised them a state yet divided the national territories along the contours of four other states – Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Ever since, the Kurds have been actively struggling for their basic human rights and freedoms in the Middle East, which had initially been alienated by international powers, led by the British and the French, and their cronies in the region, during the 20^th Century.

Understanding what has been coined the Kurdish Question by the people of Kurdistan and the international community requires engagement with the political and social developments of the Middle East in the 1960s and 1970s, during which the emergence of Arab socialism and Arab nationalism increasingly threatened the hegemony of Western capitalism in the region. Economic concern was sparked in Western industrialist states, as they feared the prospect that the rise of socialism in the region would compromise their access to oil reserves. As such, the sustainability of the US-led Western order was challenged by not only Soviet expansionism into Eastern Europe, but also by the social and psychological awakening of former colonies who were to eventually inspire decades of revolutionary movements in the late 20^th and early 21^st Centuries.

The Kurdish resistance movement is one of many uprisings in the wider region, which has taken its shape in the form of an insurgency against the Turkish state for fuelling anti-Kurdish sentiment in Turkish society and denying Kurds their basic rights, such as the right to speak their native language or listen to Kurdish music. Based on evidence from a report by Turkey’s National Intelligence Organisation, critics of the Turkish regime argue that anti-Soviet, Islamist parties and groups in Turkey were supported by the United States and Central Intelligence Agency during the Cold War as a means of curbing the growing threat of the Kurdish and Turkish-leftist movements within and beyond the region. It was as a response to these US-backed repressive policies of the Turkish state, which were directly exercised through the military coup d’état in 1980, that eventually in 1978 the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) was established by the now-imprisoned Abdullah Öcalan and revolutionaries from both the Kurdish and Turkish-left. To this day, the PKK insurgency continues as the Kurdish movement endures the enmity of international powers. The Kurds are an abandoned people in history, and their only friends are the mountains.

What defines the Kurdish struggle in the modern epoch of capitalist modernity? Abdullah Öcalan, renowned as the leader of the Kurdish people who is currently imprisoned in the island of Imrali in Turkey, has fundamentally evolved the foundations of the resistance movement from what was Marxist in theory and Leninist in organisation toward a new form of socialism, which he calls democratic confederalism. The Kurdish political theorist has argued that Marxism pays scant attention to explaining the defects of capitalism beyond the economic realm, and in a similar vein to feminist theory, argues that capitalism and patriarchy are complementary systems of mass oppression. This has revolutionised the Kurdish movement as a philosophical challenge to the state of women and men under the patriarchal nation-state. The recent revolution in Rojava (Northern Syria), where the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria was defeated and Kurdish territories were taken under control by the People’s Defence Units (YPG) and Women’s Defence Units (YPJ)-led Syrian Democratic Forces, depicts what the Kurds have long imagined – a free and democratic society based on autonomous organisation, an eco-social approach to the economy, and the liberation of women.

While the Kurds celebrate victory in part of their indigenous territories, they and their movement continue to be victims of social stigma around the world. The Kurdish movement has been, and continues to be, overlooked by the masses as merely an armed struggle based on separatist goals. This is, nonetheless, a simple observation of a more complex dynamic. For decades, leftist movements have challenged and fought against the status quo, in favour of social change. While political revolutions, whereby a transition of power from one group to another, have taken place frequently in political history, social revolutions – in which there is a structural redesign of society – have not been so frequent. The intent is to demonstrate that Kurdish revolutionary movements are more than separatist armed or radical struggles. They will inspire future movements in favour of structural rearrangements in society, based on the Rojava model of democratic confederalism – a social revolution.

Further to this, while critical approaches like Marxism explain the economic pathologies of capitalism as foundation to wider social injustices, Öcalan’s paradigm dismantles state and societal relations to understand the symbiotic relationship between feudalism, patriarchy, and capitalist modernity. Searching for answers about life, Abdullah Öcalan has, in isolated conditions on a prison island, inspired a canon of political thought through his critique of the creation of the nation-state by Western imperialist powers as the original sin. The hope of the Kurdish people is for their leader’s release from these inhumane conditions in order for prospects for peace and democracy in the Middle East to be discussed, and the persistent non-recognition of Kurds by the international system to be challenged.The scope of this article is not sufficient to provide a broad analysis of the Kurdish Question, as it is one of a multidimensional nature, involving an interplay of culture, politics, religion, and society. The origin of the Kurdish Question is disputed heavily, with some arguing that the partitioning of Kurdistan in the 15^th and 16^th Centuries by the Ottoman and Persian Empires was the start to the dilemma, while others contend that the revolutionary struggle was catalysed by the redrawing of borders by Britain and France in the early 20^th Century. Regardless, as the cradle of civilisation, Kurdistan’s geostrategic significance remains indisputable, and the region will continue to be of interest to international powers. Whether the new democratic regime in Rojava will inspire new challenges to the international capitalist order is a question time shall address.