ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the workings and attempts of institutionalization of grassroots mobilizations in Northern Syria in reference to the emergence and evolution of the Popular Committees and Women Committees in the canton of Kobane. By adopting social movement theories as a basic framework to analyze the 2011 uprisings in the MENA region, it examines the role of alternative networks and other forms of political conflict in reference to the Syrian Kurdistan case. With the end of French colonization, the Syrian Kurds in the three provinces of Jazira, Efrin, and Kobane were both excluded from Northern Turkish Kurdistan and isolated by their neighbors’ growing Arab nationalism. The chapter describes the developments within the organization of the initial mobilized self-defense groups in Northern Syria between 2011 and 2016. Kobane lived in a context of the constantly high mobilization of ordinary people between 2011 and 2016.
