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This article discusses how Rojava and its 'Autonomous Administration' simultaneously subvert and reinstate the state(s) they are fighting. Based on Abdullah Öcalan's (b. 1948) conversion to libertarianism after his imprisonment in 1999, the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) has been invested in presenting its political experiment as a 'stateless democracy', which has elicited both enthusiasm and suspicion from anarchists worldwide, and from large sections of the Western left. Far from trying to prove or disprove Rojava's own narrative, this article analyses how the construction of Rojava is a complex and often self-contradictory process, both at the rhetorical/propagandist level and in terms of actual military, political and social practices. By engaging many enemies (ISIS, al Nusra, the Free Syrian Army, the Assad regime, Iraqi Kurdistan, Turkey), both discursively and in battle, and trying to obtain support from various potential and mutually conflicting allies (the United States, Russia, Iraqi Kurdistan, the EU, the Western left, the Assad regime) the PYD/ YPG-J (People's Protection Units) are entrenched in a fraught space in which subversion and mimicry coexist in uneasy tension.

This special issue brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to reflect on the decolonization of nation-states through acts of subversion, mimicry and criminality in the colonial and postcolonial world. Since the birth of nation-states, emerging in conjunction with the first wave of globalization and the height of European colonialism in the mid-nineteenth century, avant-gardists have problematized the role of the nation-state. With the split between Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin in the First International in 1872, anarchism's challenge to parliamentary politics and the nation-state rapidly spread across the colonial world. i For instance, during the 1870s, Jewish, Italian and Spanish labour migrants to Egypt brought with them discourses of radical social emancipation, merging with local labour movements and promoting internationalist activism that resisted the nationstate as an organizing principle. ii Meanwhile, in the former Spanish and Portuguese colonies of South America, railway and maritime workers confronted formations of state bureaucratization with autonomous union democracies, contributing to working class solidarities across ethnic and national divides at the end of the nineteenth century. iii In Europe's southern gateways to overseas colonies, other challenges to the state emerged in the shape of criminal underground organizations such as the Italian Camorra. Structured much like the Japanese Yakuza and Chinese Triads and organized around ethnic and national identities, such organizations simultaneously subvert and mimic the state, presenting problems for our understanding of legal regimes and their vested interests. iv Across South Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, anti-colonial rebellions, labour strikes and boycotts during the interwar years contributed directly to the decades of formal decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s. v