Homeland’s future in the Kurdish freedom movement: openness, prefiguration, legitimization

The concept of homeland embodies the sense of attachment that links a political community to a specific territory. The political meaning embedded in the term 'attachment' underscores that the homeland can be understood as a political-territorial project infused with emotional topographies and geographies. Existing literature predominantly adopts a past-oriented perspective, emphasizing the role of history, origins, and ancestors, in shaping contemporary conceptualizations of the homeland. What is largely absent is an examination of the role of futurity in understanding the notion of homeland. Drawing on the case of the Kurdish Freedom Movement (KFM) and Berardi's (2017) framework on becoming, this article elucidates three key modes through which the future is present in the configuration of the homeland: openness (possibility), prefiguration (potency), and legitimization (power). Thus, this article demonstrates that futurity plays a crucial role in conceptualizing and forging the homeland, right in the present. This is particularly evident in the case of the KFM following its paradigm shift from Marxism-Leninism to an innovative form of communalism, known as democratic confederalism. This shift prompted the KFM to profoundly rethink its ideas of territoriality and identity, reassessing its distant past.