Worth Fighting For: Bringing the Rojava Revolution Home

by Jenni Keasden, Natalia Szarek

This is the story of two internationalist volunteers who followed in the footsteps of our friend and comrade Anna Campbell and became part of the Rojava revolution. Anna left her home in England and travelled to northeast Syria – the Rojava region of Kurdistan – to join the women fighters of the YPJ in the battle against the Islamic State. One year later, she was killed in the Turkish invasion of Afrin.

Between us we spent three years there, working alongside Kurdish revolutionaries and other internationalists from around the world, and getting to know the movement that our dear friend decided was worth fighting for.

Witnessing and taking part in a revolution in progress made us all the more determined to bring the lessons of the Kurdistan Freedom Movement home. This book is about some of those lessons, about what it means to struggle for freedom, and to insist on hope even in the darkest of times.

Through stories and reflections , we’ve tried to bring the revolution to life, and translate some of the big ideas of the movement to our context. This is our love letter to revolution, an attempt to build a bridge between worlds, and a call to arms.

Genres: Politics

260 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2023

Reviews

[Saoirse Wall · Rating 5 out of 5]

i loved this book so much!! i read it quite slowly, rly savouring it because i found the lessons in it about community,, revolution,, hope,, accountability,, conflict resolution so so helpful as ways to think about my own life , both personal and in organising. i was brought to tears a few times because of this hope & reading things i have felt as integral values of mine but hadn’t seen named before. rly engaging writing style & i am excited to dip into the generous reading list !!!
i recommend:)

[LunaSanguine · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a wonderful, wonderful book!

I remember when I read "Revolution in Rojava" (which is still appreciate) I thought: Nice one but I wish there was an other book that I could recommend to friends who aren't into academic reading. And well, here you go!
"Worth Fighting For" is written more in the style of a collection of stories, more aimed at the heart, but no little less informative.
I feel like it is written exactly for some of the young activist bubbles I know as it talks about queerness or that what some western anti-authotarian lefties interpret as leader or martyr cults really aren't. Honestly, it answeres the questions that often are kinda set aside.
It also really meant a lot to me to read the term "neurodivergence" a few times in the books as I don't see the topic of neurodivergence/disability rights usually mentioned from the Kurdish Freedom Movement (yes, there's a different set of mind and words in Europe and in Kurdistan but I'm also speaking about the Movement's structures in Germany) and it is a very important topic to me as an autist.

I really consider this book a treasure and can't recommend it enough.

[Sean Irving · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely flew through this book. The writing style is personal and easy to read, but this doesn’t take away in the slightest from the lessons and learnings shared. Highly recommend to anyone organising on the left in the UK.

[Adam Brassington · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible inspiring account of what life is like in rojava. Perfectly balancing personal stories with what the revolutionary mind looks like and how this impacts their daily lives as well as a light bit of background and theory sprinkled throughout. Makes you want to learn how you can bring communalist, anti-capitalist, ecological frameworks into your everyday life.

[Siddiq Khan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like Orwell´s Homage to Catalonia, this is an eye-witness account of a modern revolution in progress. While it shares many of the merits of Orwell´s account, including the journalistic immediacy that makes for easy reading, the authors lack his critical perspective, adopting a breathless enthusiasm that I find disturbingly unbalanced and soporific -- especially to clearly problematic elements such as the leadership cult and the predominance of a cadre of professional militants at the political vanguard (even as they claim to renounce vanguardism). Read alongside Carlos Semprun Maura´s account of the beauracritisation of the anarcho-syndicalist movement in the Spanish Revolution, the absence of any attention paid to the dangers of bureacracy, the complete indifference to the relation between the masses and the organisations that claim to represent them, severely limit the usefulness of the book for getting a clear sense of the possiblities and liabilities of the revolution.