The Emergence of a Decolonial Ecology: Democratic Resistance and Socio-ecological Transformation in Rojava/North and East Syria

Abstract

This dissertation examines the relation between colonial rule and ecocide in Kurdistan, arguing that colonial domination in Rojava operates through ecocidal coloniality that reorganizes land, water and agrarian infrastructures to dismantle Kurdish socio-economies, degrade environments, and erode Indigenous epistemic and ontological formations. Methodologically, it draws on multi-wave fieldwork, interviews, group discussions and activist-scholar engagement. To make this structure explicit, the thesis proceeds through two interrelated dynamics: the colonial structure and the decolonization struggle.

The first dynamic addresses the colonial formation in Rojava, whose core features have shaped Kurdistan’s history. Its first characteristic is an intrinsically antidemocratic and genocidal or assimilatory regime of centralization and control that extends across resources, populations and everyday life. Beyond a political mechanism, it functions as a system of classification and standardization enforcing homogeneity upon a heterogeneous landscape. Through the epistemic violence of modernist scientism and positivist rationality, colonialism has sought to produce a uniform nation, a disciplined society and subjugated subjects. A second defining characteristic is its persistent ecocidal logic. Socio-spatial designs centred on land, water and agriculture were never neutral or merely developmental, but instruments of dispossession and control. Ecological destruction, including deforestation, extractive mining and dam construction, functioned simultaneously as assimilation and elimination, exploitation, and counterinsurgency. The ecocidal vector of colonialism is inseparable from its genocidal structure.

The second dynamic shows how, against this matrix of domination, Rojava’s struggle has taken shape as anti-colonial praxis. The thesis contends that what has emerged, particularly in Rojava, is a decolonial ecology articulated through two constitutive lines. The first is democratic resistance, grounded in decentralized and directly democratic formations, conceptualized as rhizomatic democracy and rhizomatic governance. Rhizomatic governance crystallizes the political ontology of democratic autonomy: a horizontal, plural and transversal structure that counters the nation-state’s antidemocratic, centralist and homogenizing logics. The second is socio-ecological transformation, in which ecological struggle is not secondary but the ethos of life and resistance. This project reconstructs relations with land, water and life by rejecting ecocidal developmentalism and cultivating cooperative economies, ecological agriculture, and ethical and aesthetic practices rooted in communal life and traditional and liberatory epistemologies. Ecological struggle thus becomes a medium of ontological repair and decolonial futurity, directly confronting ecocidal coloniality. Taken together, democratic resistance and socio-ecological transformation constitute the ethos of an emergent decolonial ecology in Rojava, marking a holistic alternative to colonial modernity and demonstrating decolonial ecology as both critique and lived praxis.

To uncover these dynamics, the dissertation is organized as a cumulative project that interlinks five articles within a shared conceptual and empirical trajectory. Together, they map the passage from colonial design to decolonial praxis, revealing how theoretical, empirical and methodological strands converge in the structure of the thesis. The thesis architecture mirrors this unfolding. This cumulative dissertation is organized in four sections that move from framing to articles, then to synthesis and conclusion, tracing a path from colonial design (land, water, demographic engineering, schooling) to decolonial praxis and socio-ecological transformation. Section I (Chapters 1–2) establishes the groundwork: Chapter 1 outlines the thesis and introduces core concepts and stakes; Chapter 2 formulates objectives and research questions within colonial and decolonization dynamics, and articulates activist-scholar positionality and methodology. Section II (Chapters 3–7) compiles the five articles, tracing a trajectory from colonial mindset and material infrastructures to the horizon of a political ontology of decolonization and transformation. Section III (Chapters 8–9) provides the integrative synthesis: Chapter 8 consolidates definitions and scope conditions of ecocidal developmentalism and colonial drought, and identifies principal vectors of ecocidal coloniality, including agro-hydro-demographic design and epistemicide as elimination, outlining the operational logic of genocide and ecocide. Chapter 9 traces the passage from resistance to socio-ecological transformation, detailing the reconstruction of ecological agriculture, rhizomatic governance, ecopedagogy and the eco-economy as a coherent decolonial ecology, and concludes with reflections on ongoing challenges and threats. Section IV (Chapter 10) restates the findings, outlines lessons from Rojava, explores limitations and research gaps, and indicates directions for future research opened by the thesis. Ultimately, where colonial structure is ecocidal in its structure, decolonization must be ecological in substance and scope. In Rojava, democratic resistance and socio-ecological transformation together constitute decolonial ecology as a lived and evolving praxis.