Hope Without Hope: Rojava and Revolutionary Commitment

The militants of Rojava, and the autonomous society they've built, teach us how to kindle hope for the tireless fight against oppression.

Drawing on three years living and working in Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan), journalist Matt Broomfield argues the militant Kurdish movement can help the Western left relearn its commitment to hope in hopeless times. The bloodshed and chaos of the Syrian Civil War have paradoxically produced our generation’s most significant revolution. Firsthand observations from the heart of Rojava’s movement inform Broomfield’s critical engagement with its theory and practice and, inevitably, its compromises and contradictions. In the face of crises set to define the coming century—proxy conflict, resource competition, state collapse, climate catastrophe—the Kurdish movement has produced an unexpected, utopian response: an autonomous society organized outside of the nation-state, run by direct democracy and along feminist and ecological principles, surviving despite overwhelming military opposition.

The revolutionary movement of Rojava and its people shed light on struggle, strategy, and endurance—how and why to fight for revolution in the face of nearly impossible odds. Hope Without Hope carries on the long tradition of history, absurdist philosophy, and radical thought that has studied how anti-fascist and anti-colonial movements answer defeat and repression with a revolutionary faith in transformation. Only by understanding this history can we pursue the steadfast work of organizing for long-term revolutionary change in our seemingly hopeless age.

Matt Broomfield is a British journalist, poet, and organizer. From 2018 to 2020, he spent three years living and working in Rojava (North and East Syria), where he cofounded the Rojava Information Centre, the top independent, English-language news source connecting the Kurdish-led autonomous regions with the international press. His writing has appeared in the Independent, New Statesman, VICE, The Nation, and Jacobin, among others.

John Holloway teaches in the graduate school of sociology in the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Mexico. He has written widely on anti-capitalist struggles and the meaning of revolution today. His books, Change the World without Taking Power (2002), Crack Capitalism (2010), and Hope in Hopeless Times (2022) have been translated into a dozen languages and have stirred international controversy.