GET THE READING PORTION HERE: ZINE OR SCREEN, CAMAS BOOKS‘ FREE BOX, or EMMA’S FREE LIBRARIES AROUND TOWN.
ALSO LISTEN (35:00-end, 20m) and WATCH (14m)
Facilitators should note the Facilitation Guide.
We will be discussing the Peacebuilding and Conflict Resolution methods and praxis of Rojavan revolutionaries in the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria.
VARC-goers are expected to read Peacebuilding in a Conflict Setting: Peace and Reconciliation Committees in De Facto Rojava Autonomy in Syria (2017) by Dr. Yasin Duman, listen to The Women’s War podcast episode 5 Grandma Law And Revolutionary Sacrifice, (2020) and watch the SubMedia video The Fall of the Regime (2025) ahead of time for our discussion.
As always, we meet at Camas Books, 2620 Quadra Street, on Lekwungen Territory. Our meeting is Sunday April 27th @ 6:30PM.
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PS: Our friends at the Anarchist Network of “Vancouver Island” have put together a list of anarchist and adjacent projects on the territory. If you are looking to involve yourself in anarchist activism, look at their trifold! Particularly, Food not Bombs serves free vegan food for revolution every Sunday 4-6PM at Spirit “Centennial” Square and have been facing increasing harassment tied to the gentrification of the Square. Come show up to eat! They also need help from volunteers.
For August 4th, our reading group will be focusing on two pieces about fascism and authoritarianism.
Join us for a discussion of Palestinian anarchist Mohammed Bamyeh’s article on the 2010-12 uprisings that swept through north Africa and the middle east, overthrowing dictatorships in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya.
We were so inspired by reading Andrew Cornell’s history of the Movement for a New Society that we decided to explore the conversations associated with the movement. Please read the following reflective sections regarding MNS theory and praxis for the next gathering. You can find the reading here:
Last week, we read Gustav Landuaer’s Through Separation to Community and decided to swing around to Murray Bookchin’s ideas of social ecology and revolutionary thought. Social ecology is based on the conviction that nearly all of our present ecological problems originate in deep- seated social problems, and is an approach to society that embraces an ecological, reconstructive, and communitarian view on society. Murray Bookchin (1921 – 2006) was an anti-capitalist and advocated for social decentralization along ecological and true democratic lines. His ideas have influenced social movements since the 1960s, including the New Left, the anti-nuclear movement, the anti-globalization movement, Occupy Wall Street, and more recently, the democratic confederalism of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (Rojava.)
After our enthusiastic conversation about the Zapitistas’ model of Participatory Democracy, we wanted to delve more into Zapatista cosmovisión (worldview) and organization by reading Subcomandante Marcos’s “I Shit On All the Revolutionary Vanguards of this Planet,” which is a response to the Basque liberation movement Euskadi Ta Askatasuna’s (ETA) advocation of vanguardist politics. We also teased out the idea of future readings about Rojava in a continuation of our exploration of democratic centralism. Therefore, we decided in anticipation to also include the Feminist Anarchist Border Opposition’s Why Misogynists Make Great Informants, which tackles misogyny and gender violence in left-activist circles and movements.
Our next reading will be the academic article Participatory Democracy in Action: Practices of the Zapatistas and the Movimento Sem Terra, which covers the Zapatistas’ and Movimento Sem Terra’s (Landless Movement-MST) methods of organizing through participatory democracy, which emphasizes obligation to participate in decision making and a shared concern for autonomy.
