Another school year has begun in the university system in the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES). Over 3,000 students attend the three DAANES universities, Rojava University, located in Qamishlo, Kobane University in Kobane, and the newest, Al-Sharq University in Raqqa. A fourth, the University of Afrin, was forced to close following the Turkish occupation of the city in 2018.
According to the DAANES administration, the university system was born out of several goals. The first was the most simple, to provide tertiary education to the region’s youth. At the time of the foundation, access to other universities in the parts of the country controlled by Damascus was blocked. The second was to provide a source of jobs and incentive for higher-educated professionals, who were leaving the region during the war in record numbers. The universities were also conceptualized as a way for the revolutionary political project of the region, which has brought gender-equality, decentralization, pluralism and religious freedom to a population previously living under dictatorship, to be legitimized and realized through knowledge production.
It is this last goal which has caught the eye of international intellectual heavy weights who have shown an interest in the NES universities. Noam Chomsky and Slavoj Zizek have both given guest lectures at the social sciences department, and David Graeber, a renowned American anthropologist visited Rojava University before his death. The main lecture hall in Rojava University is now named after him. Other universities around the world, including Bremen University, Washington State University, and the University of Applied Sciences at Emden/Leer have partnerships with the system, and offer joint courses and seminars through the internet. This is crucial to the health of the universities, as academic institutions don’t thrive in isolation. However, the power grid in the region is unreliable. Central electrical stations or gas depots are often attacked by Turkey, making a schedule reliant on the internet difficult to maintain.
In addition, despite these burgeoning partnerships, material support for the universities on the ground remains a stumbling block. The universities find it difficult to import the necessary equipment for laboratory work, and even have trouble getting the adequate textbooks in Arabic. University officials often have to resort to smuggling books. The exemptions for education and NES under the US Cesar Act have done little to aid the situation, since the surrounding nations have a vested interest in preventing educational material from entering the region.
On the other hand, the university system has allowed for a renaissance of the Kurmanci Kurdish language, previously outlawed at some point as a language of instruction in all four countries in which it is spoken, Syria, Iran, Iraq and Turkey. In NES, you can now major in Kurdish, and receive entire degrees, including in women’s studies, in the language. This has presented its own set of challenges, as the staff at the universities and the curriculum department of the DAANES have literally had to write textbooks and create certain language in Kurdish in order to make this possible.
But the system’s biggest hurdle by far, is lack of international recognition. Students who attend the DAANES universities run the risk of earning a credential that will only allow them to work, or continue study, within the DAANES system itself. The universities must compete with other recognized universities in the area, including one university run by the Syrian regime, and a plethora of expensive private universities. Universities in NES are free for students, and provide free housing while enrolled, but this is hardly enough to make up for this huge difference in potential pay off.
The NES system has broken new ground in the intellectual history of the region, and is able to offer an education more or less on par with the other universities in the region. It has gripped the interest of academics around the world. But the challenges it faces are unlikely to abate without an end to the Syrian conflict as a whole, and at the very least a stalling of the weekly Turkish attacks on infrastructure and personnel in the region.
