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oday, many of these groups are blacklisted, as a direct result of the so-called War on Terror. This has resulted in the freezing of bank accounts, the enforcement of travel bans, and the cancellation of passports.Cynically enough, this means that through the act of blacklisting, those who are already without a state are turned stateless once more, facing a double negation. Blacklisting these organizations — literally placing them “outside” of democracy — has much to do with the threat they pose to the status quo of the global capitalist doctrine.

A collectively written text, the “Social Contract,” clarified the points of departure: Rojava was to become a non-state entity, where self-governance, gender equality, ethnic and religious diversity, the right to self-defense and communal economy would form the foundational pillars. Ever since — while in the middle of a war against the Islamic State and other jihadist groups such as the Al-Nusra Front, and surrounded by the forces of the Assad regime, Russian troops and the international “coalition forces” — Rojava revolutionaries have begun to put their new ideals of self-governance into practice.

The lines drawn throughout North Africa and the Middle-East were drawn by bureaucrats and colonists. As artist Golrokh Nafisi has said, it is time to draw new lines. Not according to the occupiers, but according to the resistance. Not lines that isolate one nation from another, but lines of new shapes and forms that allow us to enact this world anew. To create a new world we need the imaginary of what that world could or should look like. As such, every political imaginary needs an artistic imaginary as well.

What makes the Oromo experience so incomprehensible is the fact that they remained one of the last oppressed majority groups of the world in a country in which identity is both the constitutive and regulative principle of political life.

It is here, in this reservoir of songs, in the unruly dances and heart-breaking ballads, that one finds the story of the Oromo nation and its struggle for self-determination, not in the official archives and historiographies of the Ethiopian state.

wo decades on, however, no such law is forthcoming, and to add insult to injury, the ruling party announced what it calls the ‘Addis Ababa Integrated Master Plan’, allowing the unprecedented expansion of the city into Oromia. Emboldened by a symbolic election victory in which the ruling party won 100% of the 442 seats announced thus far, the government is set to implement the Master Plan, threatening the wellbeing and livelihood of Oromo farmers neighboring the city.

After more than four years of austerity, with increasingly harmful effects for most sections of the Greek population, the new government was welcomed as much needed “breathing space”.

In the end, it is irrelevant whether Tsipras and his allies deliberately planned this course of action from the start, or whether their project collapsed under the enormous pressure of the Troika’s neo-liberal hegemony – with a key role reserved for the German government.

Of course, many activists now argue that this development was foreseeable and its outcome was intended from the start. We consider this position as wrong, and believe that such processes always count. An I-knew-everything-beforehand-attitude allows people to ignore their responsibility to try and shape history, and, even worse, to look down on those who accept the challenge to provoke change.