{"id":2278,"date":"2026-01-28T12:37:15","date_gmt":"2026-01-28T09:37:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jineoloji.eu\/en\/?p=2278"},"modified":"2026-01-30T01:57:50","modified_gmt":"2026-01-29T22:57:50","slug":"resisting-the-politics-of-despair","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jineoloji.eu\/en\/2026\/01\/28\/resisting-the-politics-of-despair\/","title":{"rendered":"Resisting the Politics of Despair"},"content":{"rendered":"

Zeryan Asya, Jineoloji Academy<\/strong><\/p>\n

In a time of war, genocide, and attempts to eliminate the Rojava Revolution, the system employs, in addition to weapons, tools of special warfare, especially those that aim to make us lose hope and render us nihilistic. Special psychological warfare is one of the means most used by hegemonic states to break the will of people, societies and women. It is used to attack the ideology and the very existence of society, and we can see this currently in Rojava. Special warfare tends to play with our emotions and manipulate them; these naturally change based upon what happens and what we see. In the first days of the attack, collective emotions were gloomy and sad. Subsequently, when the population of Rojava rose up and chose to fight for a free life, emotions changed and morale rose. It is the natural state of emotions to change based upon the stimuli we receive, and it is precisely for this reason that special warfare acts on<\/span> emotions; can be one of the weaknesses of human beings. For women, this becomes even more incisive. Faced with femicides and images of violence and torture, we empathize and somehow block ourselves – we suffer and get angry – but this does not always lead to organizing and acting.<\/p>\n

Special warfare works precisely in trying to silence and immobilize people; to make them inactive in a process that requires struggle, will and resistance. The hegemonic power that attempts to destroy every form of community life plays with images, thus provoking emotions that can lead to anxiety and panic. I think there is no one who has been in contact in some way with Rojava who does not feel shock, or who does not feel weak, or who is not frightened in the face of these attacks. The images that reach us are very strong images of misogyny, of hatred for what has been built, of inhumanity. If on the one hand it provokes anger and pain that leads us to want to act, on the other it immobilizes. Many people say: “Well, every day there’s a massacre; every day a war. What can we do?” Special warfare creates panic, confusion, and limits the ability to organize and react in the right way. This panic brings anxiety and makes us feel trapped in a vortex that often leads people not to act, to stop informing themselves, or it leads to reacting in a confused, disorganized manner, and to putting people in conflict with each other.<\/p>\n

We have been accustomed to seeing deaths on television, in newspapers and on phones – a real bombardment that does not strike the body, but the soul. This is the objective of special warfare. It leads us to believe that in the face of all this we are powerless; that we can do nothing. It makes us believe that the existence of this horror is inevitable, that it is much stronger than our existence as human beings, as resisters who want to live in freedom. Once again, the body of women becomes the means to create this type of emotion, especially in a territory like Rojava and Northeast Syria, where for decades women have fought to build a more just life for everyone. The first blow must be inflicted upon them, upon their symbols, and upon those who support them. This must be made visible, shown to manipulate emotions and to make women feel that whatever they do, they will not succeed in their intent; and to make men feel powerless in the face of these attacks on their comrades, and to be ashamed of being men. It is a game that touches emotions and reinforces the concepts of patriarchy and sexism.<\/p>\n

\"\"One of the forms of resistance should be precisely in the area of emotions: politicizing them, organizing them, making them social. Emotions are a symptom of vitality, and there are no negative or positive emotions, as they all guide our actions and our thinking. For example, even extreme anger or deep sadness can be politicized, controlled, and effectively directed toward a goal. When these emotions become either flat or uncontrolled, they immobilize us and special warfare has won. All emotions are precious, but at the same time they cannot block us or make us fall into a state of inactivity. Let’s try to focus on life, and not on death; on the joy that can arise from being united and fighting; on the happiness of being able to give hope to those who are suffering or who have lost it. Seeing what is happening today we can cry, remembering the past or moments; but this crying can become organized, and\u00a0<\/span>shared to be able to better understand how we can act. Suppressing one’s emotions and pretending they don’t exist is not politicizing them, but rather falling into the trap laid by special warfare, which wants us impassive, detached and cold, or too emotionally overwhelmed to act, while the opposite is being able to show the colors of our emotions in the things we do – to give a deeper meaning to what we are trying to defend. The Revolution is not over, as it is not something that begins and ends; it is something in constant becoming, which changes according to the situation, transforms and continues. The Rojava Revolution flows in the ground itself, soaked with the blood of thousands of martyrs. It is in the women who fight and defend everything they have built; it is in the young women and men, proud to have grown up in a revolutionary land; it is in the collective memories of the people who have passed through that place; it is in the language, which chooses life and love; it is in the awareness of what is being defended, and we are ready to die for it. The Rojava Revolution is not something that can be destroyed so easily, because it is a wind that has reached every part of the world. To defend it, we must dwell on these aspects, upon the most hidden details of this Revolution. The enemy of the Revolution and of humanity knows that these are the most difficult parts to eliminate. For this reason it implements special psychological warfare, trying to annihilate all emotions connected to that place, to those people, or to make us forget by attacking memory. Or it leads us to the anxiety of having to do something, without reflecting or analyzing the present with an eye to the future, sometimes leading us to forget the reasons why we are defending that Revolution. We should not allow the language of this enemy to touch the most personal part of us – our desire to fight for a just world, for women’s freedom and for a free society. Our thinking and method should be based upon\u00a0reflection, on depth, and capable of reaching not only into people’s minds, but also their souls.<\/p>\n

To talk about Rojava is also to talk about Democratic Confederalism. It is to relate how for 12 years the different populations (Kurds, Armenians, Arabs, Chechens, Turkmen, Assyrians), with different creeds (Christian, Muslim, Yazidi, Zoroastrian), are together building a life based upon women’s freedom, direct democracy and ecology; a communal life, based upon relationships and upon making coexistence freer and more organized. Because special warfare needs to divide instead of unite, it encourages nationalism in order to destroy the project of Democratic Confederalism, which is based upon the concepts of women’s liberation and communality. In this sense also, speaking about how differences meet, what energies they unleash, and what emotions are at their base, is a way to resist and to support this project, and the people who are part of it, against the physical, political and social genocide of the values of Democratic Confederalism and the Women’s Revolution.<\/p>\n

It is here that we can see how memory plays an important role. A collective and historical memory. Our dear friend, Nagihan Akarsel, taught us how much memory is a great tool of struggle and resistance, and how much women represent the historical memory of society. We should speak of Rojava and its life, its history, the joys and sorrows of that land and those peoples, but also of the daily life of women, of the people who live in that place – with all of their differences. Anyone who has been to Rojava should talk about the life there, of the lived moments, so that the territory does not just remain in the romantic imagination.<\/p>\n

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I am writing this text from a territory where living is synonymous with resisting. Resistance: a word that embraces all the meanings of one’s territory. Life itself… The virtuous position of existence. The manifesto of the greatest freedom movement of our time that begins with the phrase “Resistance is life.” The formula of a conscious organization that seeks, protects and defends the truth by clinging to this phrase. A way of existing that responds with an integral voice, in the context of time and space, to Deleuze’s statement: “When power takes life as its objective, life itself becomes resistance to power”… Writing what one lives is a difficult act. Expressing the meaning of what one has lived from the perspective it deserves is even more difficult. This feeling can subvert all the approaches one would like to undertake. Because you find yourself in a period when you begin to count the heartbeats of those who embrace the meaning of resistance. Of those who resist dedicating their body, cell by cell, to all the pains of their territory… Of the most beautiful people of our time who reveal the meaning of resistance with their lives…1<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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1<\/a>“Archaic Voice” by Nagihan Akarsel, chapter “The virtuous posture of existence: resistance.” (edit in italian)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Zeryan Asya, Jineoloji Academy In a time of war, genocide, and attempts to eliminate the Rojava Revolution, the system employs, in addition to weapons, tools of special warfare, especially those that aim to make us lose hope and render us nihilistic. Special psychological warfare is one of the means most used by hegemonic states to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":2283,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45,93,1,4,60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academy","category-academy-of-jineoloji","category-article","category-herstory","category-self-defense"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jineoloji.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jineoloji.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jineoloji.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jineoloji.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jineoloji.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2278"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/jineoloji.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2278\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2305,"href":"https:\/\/jineoloji.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2278\/revisions\/2305"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jineoloji.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jineoloji.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jineoloji.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jineoloji.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}