On Monday 1st of June the KSN Education Working Group continued the online seminar series Lessons from Rojava: How our Social Movements can Learn from the Rojava Revolution.

You can watch the video of the session in full on Facebook or download and listen to the audio recording here.

This third session asked the question ‘What if women are the vanguard?’, and explored the nature of revolutionary leadership and empowerment in the Kurdish Freedom Movement, particularly looking at the practices which have been developed and the impact these have had.

It began with a very brief history of the women’s movement, followed by a talk from Sara at the Andrea Wolf Institute in Rojava about Jineoloji, the science of women.

Besime, co-chair of the Women’s Diplomacy Committee in Europe, spoke about the co-chair system as part of a broader vision for a new internationalist movement for democratic world women’s confederalism.

We ended with a discussion about what feminist movements in Europe and the rest of the world can learn from the ideas and philosophy of the movement and how we can put them into practice in our organising.

Underneath them all is the principle that women must organise, educate, live, work, fight and struggle autonomously in order to develop their own liberatory consciousness and capacity to strive for a free life for everyone.