- The Asayish [Internal Security] work as traffic controllers, arrest criminals, protect victims of domestic violence, serve as security guards at main governing buildings and control the movement of people and goods from one canton to another. The HPC [Civil Defense] in contrast, are people trained in basic security who only patrol their own neighborhood. The purpose of both forces is explicitly to protect the people from outside threats such as terrorist forces. It is always the HPC that protects a neighborhood, never the Asayish. The Asayish protects the city while the HPC protects the community. Both organizations have a gender quota of at least 40 percent women, if not more.
This would need some modification to work in the US, of course. Still, I think there's something we can learn here, even if it's nothing more than acknowledging how significant changes must be.
One of the foundational values of democratic confederalism is an anti-hierarchical approach to communal structures and co-existence. Essentially, for this anti-hierarchical system to work, it must be based on the active promotion of equality across ethnic, religious and decision-making processes. This approach starts with the difficult task of promoting women’s liberation and participation throughout the public arena. A quota of 40 to 60 percent women’s participation exists across all administrative and decision-making structures. Establishing this kind of society in the US would require us to think differently about a number of things. We certainly aren't ready for it now, but maybe our grandchildren will be. Assuming, of course, that the existing state doesn't keep suppressing anything vaguely like this.However, before the establishment of this system was possible, an alternative ideology needed to be developed that provided a blueprint for an ideal, democratic society. Rojava’s system is based on democratic confederalism, a theory developed by the Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan and inspired by Murray Bookchin’s social ecology.