Rojava’s Promise and the Dissolution of the SDF: Time for the Left to Rethink the Kurdish Question?

A Call for a Democratic Citizenship State, Social Justice and a Socialist Horizon.

By Rezgar Akrawi

August 26, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Montecruz Foto CC BY-SA 3.0

The People’s Palace: The End of One Experiment and the Beginning of a New Question

On 25 August 2026, Mazloum Abdi announced from the People’s Palace in Damascus that the mission of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) had come to an end and that it was dissolving as an independent military force, along with the dissolution of the Autonomous Administration (Rojava) and of the military and civilian formations attached to it, all of them absorbed into the institutions of the Syrian state. 

The announcement followed the broad military operation launched by government forces in January 2026, which cost the SDF large stretches of the territory it controlled and opened a negotiating track that ended in an agreement to integrate its forces and institutions into the Syrian state.

I regard this as a positive development, because it reduces the likelihood of devastating nationalist wars whose first victims are always workers and the labouring poor of every nationality. Yet while the successive agreements, from March 2025 to the comprehensive agreement of January 2026 and on to the announcement of dissolution, did lower the risk of war and spare the people of the region further destruction, they contained no provision whatsoever on the questions we fight for as leftist and progressive forces: women’s rights, the secular character of the state, an end to privatisation, protection of the public sector, guarantees for the rights of working women and men, the achievement of social justice, and democratic elections at all levels of government.

The model that a wide segment of the Kurdish and international left presented for years as a leftist social, feminist and grassroots democratic revolution ended by a decision taken at the top and announced from a presidential palace in Damascus, with no popular referendum and no declared decision by the councils and communes that the SDF had presented to the world as the bodies supposedly exercising popular sovereignty in what was called the “Autonomous Administration,” supposedly built on the power of the people. 

The United States, which had been the principal military and political backer of the SDF while simultaneously supporting the political and military trajectory of the new authorities in Damascus, was a central party in shaping the course of the war and then the course of its resolution. That fact alone reveals where decision-making power actually sat the entire time, and how far a wager on the major imperialist powers can be trusted.

What stands out is how the costs were distributed. The new state absorbed a section of the military and party elite of the SDF, despite the class-based, religious and authoritarian character of the new political order. A number of SDF commanders were appointed to military posts, others received ranks and administrative positions, and they became an active part of the military, political, administrative and security apparatus of the Syrian government, and of its capitalist class structure. Meanwhile the working people – Kurds, Arabs, Syriacs and every other community – were left facing the same social, economic and political problems that preceded the war, now sharpened by years of conflict and destruction.

In parallel, decrees were issued recognising the Kurds as a constituent part of the Syrian people, recognising Kurdish as a national language and Newroz as a national holiday, and lifting the effects of the unjust 1962 Hasakah census. 

These are real gains that generations struggled for. Yet the recognition came after the balance of power had been settled rather than before it, and rights granted by decree can be withdrawn by a counter-decree, all the more so under an undemocratic government resting on Islamist organisations with a history of repression and violence. What is required today is to turn these gains into binding constitutional text within a comprehensive political transition, so that they do not remain favours dispensed by an authoritarian power.

This warning carries double weight given the nature of the new authorities in Damascus, who have offered no clear and binding guarantees regarding the secular character of the state, women’s rights or public freedoms. On the contrary, their record of repression and documented violations raises fears of a new authoritarianism under a religious cover, no less dangerous than the one before it.

What Belongs in the Record, and What Cannot Be Buried

Objectivity requires that the positive side be recorded as well. In the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, international reports have documented the hosting of large numbers of displaced people from every Iraqi community, a level of stability and of social and religious freedom that in certain respects stood higher than in other parts of Iraq, and a role in protecting minorities from the threat of extermination during the rise of ISIS.

In north and east Syria, the Syrian Democratic Forces played an effective military role in the fight against ISIS and paid a heavy price in lives. Attempts were made to build a civil administrative model under conditions of war and siege, and relative progress was achieved in women’s participation, which is rare in the context of the region.

Against this, international human rights organisations have documented serious and systematic violations in the Kurdistan Region: the detention and torture of journalists and human rights defenders, the suppression of protests against unemployment, corruption and unpaid salaries, at times with live ammunition, and serious failures in protecting women from violence, alongside wider documented abuses. In north and east Syria, extensive violations by the Syrian Democratic Forces have likewise been documented, including the recruitment of children under the age of eighteen in breach of its repeated pledges, arbitrary detention and torture, and the suppression of demonstrations. 

Human rights reports have also documented allegations of abuses against Arab residents and of forced displacement in some areas, as well as the closure of media offices and civil society organisations. Since the integration, United Nations investigators have continued to receive testimony concerning killings, enforced disappearances and arbitrary detention in Hasakah, while the humanitarian consequences of the fighting have been tracked by United Nations agencies, and the international commission of inquiry remains the body mandated to establish responsibility for such crimes.

The Gap Between Discourse and Practice, and the Wager on American Imperialism

The left, whether local or international, faces a complex challenge: how does it defend the legitimate rights of the Kurdish people while holding to consistent critical standards towards every authority without exception? That balance is the condition for the credibility of internationalist solidarity itself.

Solidarity with the oppressed Kurdish people and with all oppressed peoples is a basic principle of the left, grounded in values that reject national subjugation, class exploitation and every form of discrimination. The Kurdish people have been subjected to historic and continuing national oppression that has included genocide, forced displacement, the denial of cultural and linguistic rights, and political repression.

Such solidarity, however, does not rest on unconditional alignment. It has to draw a clear line between supporting the right of oppressed peoples to dignity, equality and self-determination, and offering unqualified endorsement to particular nationalist parties whose involvement in grave and documented violations has been established – parties that throughout their history have practised political assassination, arbitrary detention, enforced disappearance and torture against their opponents, many of them from the ranks of the left.

A large part of the left was drawn to the concept of “democratic confederalism” and to the ideas of Abdullah Öcalan that influenced the Autonomous Administration as an alternative to the centralised nation-state. Practice on the ground, though, exposed a sharp contradiction. While the talk was of communes and grassroots popular democracy, military and financial decision-making was concentrated in the hands of unelected party and military cadres operating with a rigidly centralist mentality.

As for deploying the language of ecology, feminism and statelessness as a rhetorical cover, presented to Western and especially leftist public opinion, on behalf of a one-sided military authority working closely with American military and security institutions and receiving funding from them, my view is that this does no service to leftist thought. It empties that thought of its content and turns it into a force operating on behalf of those very institutions.

When movements that present themselves as revolutionary or liberationist come to depend on American financial and military resources, this is no passing tactical matter, since it gradually reshapes their internal nature. As the centre of gravity shifts from popular mobilisation to external funding, a movement changes from a social force rooted in a popular base into a military force dependent on external funding, and its survival becomes tied to the continuation of international support more than to the mass base that will ultimately decide its future. 

The moment the backer’s priorities change, the structural fragility is exposed all at once. This is precisely what happened, and it is what I pointed to in earlier articles as far back as 2018.

Washington lifted sanctions on Damascus in May 2025, received Ahmed al-Sharaa at the White House in November 2025 and brought Syria into the international coalition against ISIS. The January 2026 campaign then unfolded amid American and Turkish understandings. The American envoy Tom Barrack stated openly that his country does not support federalism in Syria and that the original purpose of those forces had effectively come to an end, while a former American envoy refused to describe what happened as a betrayal, explaining that Washington had always regarded the alliance as temporary, tactical and transactional. The testimony of the decision-makers themselves makes any further analysis of the wager on the great capitalist powers unnecessary.

The structure presented as an alliance among the region’s communities also came apart at the first serious test. Before that, its leadership had accepted, as a matter of fact on the ground, the role of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (the Barzanis) as the primary national reference point for the Kurds, despite its family and tribal rule, its corruption and its hereditary transfer of power. This became plain when negotiations moved to Erbil and Masoud Barzani took on the role of mediator and guarantor.

This is not a conclusion I am advancing today, after the SDF experience has ended, since I wrote in this direction years ago.

In an article titled “The Nation-State? Or the State of Citizenship and Rights?” published in 2018, 

I wrote the following about the experience of the Kurdish nationalist left in Syria:

“In my view, the experience of the Kurdish nationalist left through the Democratic Union Party and its affiliates in Syria, however far it develops, will amount to reforms of a leftist and radical civil character, resembling the Baath Party’s rule in Iraq and Syria in the 1970s, which was among the most significant historical experiences of nationalist left government in the Middle East, and every one of those experiences turned into a corrupt dictatorial and authoritarian regime.”

In the same article, I also warned about the nature of the alliance with the United States, writing:

“America, as the largest capitalist power, supports most of the reactionary and racist regimes in the world, and has never once stood on the side of oppressed peoples or of humane and liberationist values. It is present in Syria solely to secure its strategic interests there and in the region and to counter Russian influence. In my view, America’s alliance with the Syrian Democratic Forces serves to fill an American gap, the absence of large ground forces of its own on Syrian territory, whether regular troops or security companies, so it relies on the human military capacity of the Syrian Democratic Forces to carry out its agenda inside Syria. 

This alliance resembles the alliance that parts of the Iraqi opposition, through the Iraqi National Congress, formed with America politically and militarily on the eve of the overthrow of the Baathist dictatorship in Iraq. I believe it is a temporary and fragile alliance that follows American interests, that it lends legitimacy to American intervention and practices in Syria, and that it also helps to prettify America’s ugly and grim face locally, regionally and globally. America is known for abandoning its allies once their tasks are over, or when they conflict with its agenda, and we have many other examples of this. Its strategic interests with Turkey remain the most important and the decisive ones, and the matter is a question of time, nothing more.”

Similar Nationalist Cliques Speaking Different Languages

I have noted in earlier texts that no fundamental differences exist among the ruling nationalist cliques, whether in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq or among those that governed north and east Syria, nor between them and the ruling nationalist regimes and bourgeoisies of the region, in Baghdad, Damascus or Ankara. 

There are deep similarities in the nature of their power and in their class interests. What divides them concerns shares, influence, resources and the division of power, rather than the character of rule or the interests of the labouring classes, and all of them share, in varying degrees, in impoverishing the masses, suppressing freedoms and violating economic, social and political rights, whatever their national or religious starting point. Events and realities in both the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and Syria have confirmed this reading to a considerable extent.

It is therefore not enough for the left to declare its solidarity with “the Kurdish people” in the abstract. Peoples are not homogeneous blocs. They are class formations in which national contradictions intersect with class contradictions, and there is no pure people or ethnicity free of internal class struggle.

The left has to settle its position: which class of the Kurdish people does it stand with? With a rentier bourgeoisie and party elites that monopolise power and wealth, or with the working women and men among Kurds, Arabs, Turkmen and the other nationalities living in those areas – people who suffer authoritarian rule, poverty, unemployment, marginalisation and collapsing services, whose right to independent trade union and political organisation is restricted, and who alone pay the price of nationalist wars with their blood and with the future of their children?

What has happened in Syria, and what is happening in the Kurdistan Region, make this reassessment all the more urgent, and it does not concern Kurdish nationalists alone. Part of the left in the Arab world defended dictatorial regimes for years, among them the Baathist nationalist regimes in Iraq and Syria, while another part defended other nationalist models and parties. What is required, then, is not to abandon solidarity with peoples and their right to determine their own future.

It is to reconsider the relationship between the left and authoritarian nationalist parties and regimes, and to free that solidarity from the uncritical justification of violations and of the authorities and political forces committing them, whatever their national or ideological identity.

The Alternative: A Democratic Citizenship State and Social Justice

While I am fully convinced of the right of all oppressed peoples to self-determination, local, regional and international conditions and present realities do not allow for the formation of an independent Kurdish nation-state in the foreseeable future, and no serious international support exists for such a path. 

The events of 2026 offered clear proof of this, when a quasi-state entity – the Autonomous Administration in Syria, backed by the largest imperialist military power in the world – effectively came to an end within months, as soon as the calculations of its funders shifted and the regional and international balance of forces changed. These developments could also be reflected in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, in line with shifts in American interests and alliances and in regional and international power balances.

At the same time, I believe that humanity’s intellectual and legal development, and the growing weight of the values of human rights, social justice and citizenship, compel a rethinking of nation-state projects built on ethnic and religious loyalties. The more worthwhile struggle, in my view, is a common struggle of the Kurdish people together with the other peoples of the region and its labouring masses, aimed at moving beyond the exclusionary nation-state and at preventing workers and the labouring poor from being turned into fuel for destructive nationalist wars that ultimately serve the interests of nationalist bourgeoisies and elites.

The alternative, as I see it, concerns more than the Kurdish question alone, offering a framework for addressing the various national and religious problems of the region: the democratic citizenship state, resting on a constitution grounded in international human rights conventions, on the neutralisation of nationality and religion within the state, on guarantees of national and cultural equality for all communities, and on the rejection of every form of national domination. 

It rests as well on a decentralised, democratic federal system with fair geographic and administrative foundations, allowing broad self-government within a unified state, alongside honest elections, party pluralism, separation of powers, an independent judiciary, freedom of the press and of trade union and political organisation, and a complete break with authoritarianism, hereditary power and family and tribal rule.

Such a state cannot be complete without social justice that guarantees the rights of the labouring masses of every nationality and religion, protects the public sector, and rejects privatisation and neoliberal policies that impoverish the masses and enrich the elites. Within this framework, the national and cultural rights of all nationalities, religions and communities can be secured, without placing any nationality or religious group above another.

The Kurdish cause is a just cause deserving genuine and principled solidarity. Genuine solidarity, however, does not mean granting nationalist parties and elites political or moral immunity. It means supporting the struggle of the Kurdish people and of all the peoples of the region for their rights, freedoms, dignity and social justice, and refusing to let the national question be turned into an instrument for entrenching the power of elites and protecting their class privileges.

I do not write these words from the position of an outside observer. I am of Kurdish origin, and in my youth I was part of this struggle. I experienced its aspirations, hopes and contradictions at close range. 

Criticising the SDF is therefore not criticism of Kurdish rights; criticising the ruling parties in the Kurdistan Region is not criticism of the Kurdish cause; and rejecting the nation-state is not a rejection of national identity or national rights. It is a call for a leftist and humanist alternative that moves beyond exclusionary nationalism towards a democratic citizenship state, social justice and a socialist horizon.

Rezgar Akrawi

Rezgar Akrawi is a leftist researcher specializing in issues of technology and the left, working in the field of systems development and e-governance.

Qatar: From Impoverished Peninsula to Rentier Mediator State

The Political Economy of a Small Regional Power in the Global Capitalist Order

By Majid Maleki Meighani

August 26, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Secretary Blinken and Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani of Qatar

This article examines Qatar’s position by combining rentier state theory, world-systems theory, and Marxist political economy. Its central argument is that Qatar’s transformation from a poor, sparsely populated Gulf peninsula into a wealthy state with outsized diplomatic influence is not the product of independent development. It results instead from monopoly control over natural gas reserves, deep integration into global financial and energy markets, and the security umbrella of the US military. Qatar is not a rising semi-peripheral power in the mold of Turkey. It is an ultra-wealthy but structurally dependent rentier state, whose wealth derives from a monopoly position in the global energy cycle and from investing that wealth in Western financial centers, rather than from production or labor at home.

Behind Qatar’s image as a peace broker and regional soft power — from Al Jazeera to the US–Taliban talks and the Israel–Hamas negotiations — lies a class reality that receives far less attention: the population that produces this wealth through its labor makes up the overwhelming majority of the country’s residents, yet holds no citizenship, no basic political rights, and no real stake in the wealth it produces. The article asks whether Qatar has become an independent actor in world politics, and argues that its diplomatic autonomy does not negate its structural dependency — it is one way of managing that dependency.

Introduction: From Forgotten Peninsula to Global Host

Before the 1970s, Qatar was one of the poorest sheikhdoms on the Gulf coast, its economy built on pearl diving and fishing, under British protection until 1971. Oil brought gradual change from the 1940s, but the real turning point was the North Field — the world’s largest non-associated gas field, shared with Iran (known there as South Pars). Investment in LNG technology from the 1990s onward made Qatar the world’s largest LNG exporter.

The result is wealth wildly disproportionate to the country’s population. Qatar’s GDP per capita is among the highest in the world, and its sovereign wealth fund, the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), manages roughly $450 billion in global assets, including stakes in Volkswagen, Barclays, and Harrods. These figures alone don’t tell Qatar’s story. The question this article returns to is who produces this wealth, and who benefits from it.

Qatar is a textbook rentier state: a state whose revenue comes from natural resource rents rather than taxing domestic production. This inverts the usual relationship between state and society. Where classical capitalism ties the state’s finances to taxing productive classes, and so to some accountability toward them, a rentier state earns income by selling a resource directly on the world market and can fund broad welfare without taxation — welfare that doubles as an instrument of control and as the legitimating basis of Al Thani rule.

Rentier theory alone can’t explain why Qatar, unlike most other Gulf rentier states, has become a diplomatic actor disproportionate to its size. That requires a global-level analysis: Qatar has channeled its rentier wealth into the circuits of global capital accumulation, becoming an active investor in the world order rather than a passive recipient of it. At the same time, through Al Jazeera and mediation diplomacy, it has built symbolic capital that lets it play an outsized role in regional crises, from Afghanistan to Gaza.

Qatar as Rentier State: Economic and Class Structure

Qatar’s resident population is roughly 3 to 3.7 million. What matters is its composition: Qatari citizens are only about 10 to 11 percent of the total, while over 85 percent of residents are foreign workers, mainly from India, Bangladesh, Nepal, the Philippines, Egypt, and Sri Lanka. The overwhelming majority of people who live and work in Qatar can never obtain citizenship, regardless of how long they’ve been there or where their children were born.

This is the structural core of Qatar’s political economy. The workers who actually produce the country’s wealth — in construction, services, domestic work, healthcare, education, engineering — are denied citizenship, the vote, the right to unionize, and often basic job security. The small citizen minority, by contrast, works mainly in the public sector and lives on subsidies, cheap or free housing, and free education and healthcare.

The primary class division here is not simply capital versus labor in the classical sense, but two groups defined by legal-ethnic status: a citizen minority that receives a share of state rent and grants the ruling family political legitimacy in return, and a migrant working majority excluded from that rent entirely, present as temporary and deportable labor with no political standing. The kafala system, until recently, tied nearly every aspect of a migrant worker’s life — changing jobs, leaving the country — to the employer’s consent.

Pressure ahead of the 2022 World Cup forced reforms: abolishing employer permission for job changes, abolishing exit permits for most workers, and setting a national minimum wage. Human Rights Watch has called these reforms unprecedented for the Gulf, but the same reports note that much of the kafala system persists in practice — workers still often need a former employer’s no-objection letter to switch jobs, even after wage theft, and the minimum wage (around $274 a month) still leaves workers economically dependent on employers. The reforms are better read as a limited reconfiguration to lower Qatar’s reputational costs than as the end of the underlying system.

This is a form of double exploitation. First, class exploitation in the direct sense: migrant workers produce surplus value extracted through low wages and the absence of collective bargaining. Second, exploitation at the level of citizenship: a temporary-migration system with no path to naturalization denies workers any lasting claim on the wealth they help produce, no matter how long they or their children have lived in the country. This makes Qatar — and the Gulf states more broadly, which together host eleven percent of the world’s migrants — one of the most concentrated forms of class-citizenship inequality in the world today.

The Sovereign Wealth Fund and Global Capital Accumulation

If the previous section showed how Qatar’s wealth is produced, this one asks how it’s deployed. Largely not toward domestic industrial development, but into the core centers of global capitalism.

The QIA, founded in 2005, is today one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds, and an active player in global markets rather than a passive reserve: stakes in Volkswagen, Barclays, Harrods, part of Paris Saint-Germain, and property across Europe and North America. This makes Qatar a shareholder with a direct stake in the stability of the same global financial system that keeps peripheral economies dependent — and, at the same time, deeply exposed to that system’s volatility.

Qatar has pursued only limited economic diversification. Its Vision 2030 program has expanded petrochemicals, aviation, financial services, and education, but LNG still accounts for over 60 percent of government revenue, and its strategy for climbing the global hierarchy has run mainly through financializing rentier wealth rather than through industrial development on the scale of, say, South Korea’s postwar transition.

This financial strategy is also a variant of capital export. The companion analysis of Turkey uses Marxist imperialism theory to explain that country’s construction and defense firms operating abroad — capital export in productive form, building infrastructure and opening markets. Qatar practices something closer to a mirror version: capital export in purely rentier form, buying equity in existing Western firms and property rather than creating new productive capacity anywhere. The QIA doesn’t compete with Volkswagen; it draws a return from Volkswagen’s existing profitability. That distinction matters, because it’s also why Qatar’s global financial reach converts into less structural leverage than Turkey’s — Ankara can threaten to pull a market or a contract, while Doha’s leverage is largely confined to the access that shareholding buys.

The 2010s oil price decline showed this dependence has real costs: even the wealthiest rentier states aren’t insulated from world energy markets, and reports from that period described the QIA as a middling investor with unremarkable European returns. Qatar’s financial power, in other words, remains bound to a single commodity and to the health of the Western financial system it has invested in.

Al Jazeera: Symbolic Capital as Foreign Policy

If the QIA is Qatar’s financial instrument, Al Jazeera — founded in 1996 with state backing — is its symbolic one. The first Arabic-language network to offer 24-hour coverage relatively independent of state censorship elsewhere in the region, it became one of the Arab Spring’s most influential news sources.

Al Jazeera’s role can’t be reduced to press freedom. It functioned as a tool for accumulating symbolic capital — the capacity to shape regional narratives, which let a small state punch above its weight. It gave Qatar an image distinct from more conservative neighbors like Saudi Arabia, and its sympathetic Arab Spring coverage of moderate Islamist movements, the Muslim Brotherhood above all, carved out a distinct ideological position for Doha.

That coverage should be read against the same hegemonic crisis at the center of the Turkey analysis. As Washington’s capacity to directly manage the region eroded after Iraq and Afghanistan, the resulting vacuum was contested by regional actors offering competing narratives and patronage. Al Jazeera’s rise is a media-sector instance of the same dynamic: a smaller state using the cracks in declining US regional control to build an instrument of influence no single power any longer fully supplied.

This came with costs. Qatari support for the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamist currents in Egypt, Libya, and Syria put it at odds with Saudi and Emirati security strategy, and the conflict peaked in the 2017–2021 blockade crisis, when Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt cut ties with Qatar and demanded, among other things, Al Jazeera’s closure — evidence that Qatar’s rivals saw the network as a state instrument, not an independent outlet. Qatar weathered the crisis by deepening ties with Turkey and Iran, demonstrating a real capacity for balancing among rivals, without ever escaping structural dependency itself.

Al Udeid: The American Security Umbrella and the Limits of “Independence”

No account of Qatar’s claimed independence is complete without its military reality. Al Udeid Air Base, near Doha, is the largest US base in the Middle East and hosts the forward headquarters of US Air Forces Central Command. Qatar financed its own construction and expansion, and it is the backbone of the Al Thani regime’s security: a small, wealthy state with limited indigenous military capacity, sitting between much larger neighbors, whose survival rests on an American guarantee rather than a national army.

This dependency is the key to Qatar’s seemingly independent foreign policy. Doha hosts the region’s largest US base while also hosting the Taliban’s political office (which produced the 2020 US–Taliban Doha agreement) and Hamas’s political bureau, and while maintaining ties with Iran — something none of America’s closer regional allies do. That is not independence from the hegemon. It is precisely the American guarantee that lets Qatar mediate with actors like the Taliban and Hamas, a role Washington itself benefits from as a channel to parties it won’t negotiate with directly.

Qatar’s mediation diplomacy, in other words, is a function performed within the American-led order, not a sign of independence from it: Qatar supplies a service the system needs but can’t provide directly. This is the same dynamic the Turkey analysis identifies in markets and trade routes, transposed onto diplomacy — a declining hegemon subcontracting specific functions to trusted smaller states rather than losing its grip on them. Turkey absorbs functions tied to Syria, the Caucasus, and NATO’s eastern flank; Qatar absorbs back-channel mediation with actors Washington cannot approach directly. Neither case is the smaller state escaping the hegemon’s orbit — both are the hegemon, under strain, redistributing tasks within it.

Qatar’s role in the 2023–2025 Gaza ceasefire talks illustrates this well. Doha hosted Hamas’s leadership and, alongside Egypt and in coordination with Washington, mediated multiple negotiating rounds. But the role was entirely contingent: in fall 2024, under US pressure, Qatar temporarily suspended its hosting of Hamas leaders and put mediation “on hold,” only to resume months later once the US administration changed. Qatar’s mediating power, however operationally real, remains an instrument in the hands of larger actors rather than a position it can exercise freely.

What Qatar’s Defenders Would Say

A fair account should register the strongest version of the opposing case. Defenders of Qatar’s trajectory point to genuine, ILO-recognized progress on kafala reform; to Vision 2030 investment in petrochemicals, aviation, and education as a real, if partial, diversification effort; and to the practical value of Qatari mediation — the Doha channel likely saved lives during the Gaza ceasefire process that no other actor was positioned to broker.

These points are accurate as far as they go, but they describe adaptation within the rentier-mediator model rather than a break from it. Kafala reform has changed enforcement mechanics without changing the underlying fact that migrant workers have no path to citizenship or political voice. Diversification has broadened Qatar’s revenue mix without displacing hydrocarbon rents as the fiscal base. And mediation, however useful in a given crisis, remains available to Doha only within limits Washington sets. None of this refutes the structural argument; it shows the same structure can produce real, situational benefits while leaving its basic terms unchanged.

Democracy and Legitimacy at Home

Qatar is a hereditary absolute emirate; the Al Thani family has ruled uninterrupted since the mid-nineteenth century. Its Advisory Council, partly elected since 2021, has no real legislative authority. Political parties are banned and independent unions are effectively impossible — even Al Jazeera never criticizes the Qatari government.

The theoretically interesting point is not the list of restrictions but the mechanism that makes them durable: a rentier social contract in which the state trades a share of gas rents — subsidies, public jobs, free services — for a monopoly on political power. Unlike the classical capitalist contract, which ties the state to some accountability through taxation, this contract needs no real political participation, because state revenue is independent of domestic consent by construction.

That contract’s cost is total political subordination, borne unevenly. Even the citizen minority that benefits from it has no institutional channel to challenge the ruling family. For the migrant majority, exclusion is total: no political rights and none of the legal protections citizens have. Class hierarchy in Qatar maps directly onto legal-citizenship hierarchy — a structure that also forecloses cross-border worker solidarity, since migrants arrive from competing nationalities and are kept from organizing under kafala by design.

Comparison with Turkey

Qatar and Turkey are often grouped together as “emerging regional powers,” but the comparison mainly shows how different their underlying structures are. Turkey has a genuine industrial base, a large domestic workforce (near 85 million), a diversified capitalist class, and real integration into global production chains; its regional power derives from production — goods, arms, construction and engineering services — even if that production stays dependent on Western capital and technology.

Qatar is closer to the opposite case: a citizen population the size of a mid-sized city, an industrial base confined to one commodity, and a “domestic” capitalist class barely distinguishable from the ruling family itself. Its power comes from a monopoly position in one strategic commodity and the financialization of the rent it generates, not from production. It doesn’t really fit the Wallersteinian semi-periphery category, which presumes exactly the productive base and diversified capitalist class Qatar lacks. A more useful label, extending rentier theory to the world-systems level, is “rentier micro-power”: ascent through financial ownership and symbolic capital rather than through any real movement up the global division of labor.

The class implications differ accordingly. Turkey’s working class, whatever its constraints, holds citizenship and has organized — strikes, the Gezi Park protests — in ways Qatar’s actual working class, migrant labor with no citizenship path, largely cannot. Qatari labor protest, when it happens, tends to stay spontaneous and scattered, and is put down through dismissal and deportation rather than negotiated with.

Has Qatar Become “Independent”?

The answer, from a Marxist standpoint, is no — not because Qatar lacks any capacity for maneuver, which would be too simple a claim, but because its diplomatic independence sits on structural dependencies that have never been challenged.

Economically , Qatar remains tied to a single commodity’s world price. A long-term shift toward renewables could erode the material base of its position.

Financially , its wealth sits in Western markets, so its fortunes are bound to the health of a financial system it doesn’t control.

Militarily, its survival depends on Al Udeid. Doha can talk to the Taliban and Hamas, but it can’t pursue a policy that fundamentally breaks with US strategic interests without risking the regime’s existence.

Socially, and most fundamentally, none of this diplomatic standing has meant liberation for the people who actually live in Qatar. If a political society’s independence is measured by its citizens’ capacity to shape their own collective fate rather than by its state’s geopolitical weight, Qatar hasn’t approached that measure — the worker with no path to citizenship and the citizen with no real accountability over the ruling family are both, in different ways, excluded from it.

Conclusion: Geopolitical Reach Without Social Emancipation

Qatar confirms, from a different angle, the point the Turkey analysis makes: a hegemonic crisis creates room for smaller actors to punch above their weight, but that room never amounts to a break from the logic of global capital accumulation. Qatar has built an outsized diplomatic role through gas monopoly, financialized rent, media-based symbolic capital, and skillful use of the American security umbrella — without resolving any of its underlying dependencies.

What that role obscures, and what a left, anti-imperialist reading should insist on restoring to view, is the class reality inside the country: a majority with no citizenship or voice, producing the wealth a small citizen minority lives on under a system with no real accountability. Qatar is a compressed, exaggerated version of a contradiction visible across the world capitalist system, Turkey included — ascent in the global hierarchy without any change in who does the work, or in how much freedom they get in return.

The alternative isn’t relocating Qatar within the existing hierarchy but changing the relations that make the hierarchy possible: citizenship and organizing rights for migrant workers, a genuine end to kafala, and transnational solidarity between labor movements in migrant-origin countries and democratic forces across the Gulf. That horizon looks distant given the region’s current climate of repression. It remains the only one that moves past rentier power and diplomatic mediation toward the actual emancipation of the region’s working class.

Majid Maleki Meighani

Majid Maleki Meighani, (sometimes writing under the name Majid Maleki), is an Iranian political analyst, writer, and translator. He was imprisoned for his political activities. His work focuses on critical analysis of Iran’s labor movement, the political left, anti-imperialist critiques of geopolitics, and social movements in West Asia and the Global South. His analysis is grounded in direct fieldwork and interviews within local communities. He has translated into Persian Walter LaFeber’s Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America and the collection Voices of the Arab Spring. He has been a contributor to ZNetwork, Tribune Zamane, and Akhbar-e Rooz. You can access his full body of work on his author page on ZNetwork.

 

Fuel Shortages and Extractivism in Bolivia

By Claudia López Pardo

August 22, 2026

Source: Ojalá

Featured Image: The World People’s Conference on Climate Change and Mother Earth’s Rights, Cochabamba, Bolivia, 2010. The City Project via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.)

Bolivia’s energy crisis shows no signs of abating. A shortage of fuel is driving uncertainty, as people are forced to queue at gas stations in major cities.

Lines filled with cars of all sizes, shapes, colors, and models waiting to refuel carpet cities, becoming part of the urban landscape. Rows of jerry cans hold their owners’ place in line. There are also long lines of freight trucks, with wait times ranging from one to three days to fill up with diesel. In some places, there is also a shortage of propane for household use. 

The practice of lining up for fuel has quickly become the norm, and the shortages are an indicator of crisis, inflation, speculation, and the increasing precariousness of daily life.

Everyday conversations are full of questions. How will we deal with the gas shortage? Will we go back to cooking with firewood? How much more will the price of propane go up?

Another question being asked in Bolivian homes and in the media today is whether new drilling could resolve the daily problems created by fuel shortages.

The significant decline in gas reserves and production has the government of Rodrigo Paz, heir to the previous extractivist regime, sparing no effort to advance the operations of Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales Bolivianos (YPFB) and Petróleo Brasileiro (PETROBRAS) in the Tariquía Flora and Fauna Reserve.

Added to the issue of shortages is the adulterated gasoline distributed by YPFB, leading to damage to vehicles. The government is meant to pay compensation to 89,651 affected individuals.

Although YPFB accepted institutional responsibility, all signs point to corruption within the state apparatus. In April, the minister of hydrocarbons Mauricio Medinaceli was fired and is currently under house arrest.

What’s clear is that there is not enough fuel to meet daily demand. The lines for propane, diesel, and gasoline are the visible, recurring manifestations of a fuel shortage that has persisted since the beginning of 2025, if not before. 

This issue extends beyond the cities. Life in rural areas takes place on a more family- or community-based scale and is affected by the scarcity and difficulty of obtaining diesel to run agricultural machinery and tools. 

In contrast, agro-industrial capital does not have to wait in line: the Eastern Agricultural Chamber has an agreement with YPFB guaranteeing a direct daily supply of fuel to business.

The Paz administration announced that it will keep the domestic price of propane frozen at 22.50 Bolivian pesos ($1.89 USD) per 24.2-liter cylinder, but the decline in domestic gas production is putting increasing pressure on the cost structure. This concern is related to the possibility of having to import propane at significantly higher prices.

The gas crisis may gradually spill over into households’ day-to-day lives, especially if the state can no longer cover the difference between domestic prices and import costs.

In addition, price hikes for basic goods and staple foods are on the horizon, which will bring a new host of challenges to Bolivian kitchens and for social reproduction.

Terms of the dispute

There are two ways to approach what is at stake in the debate over whether Tariquía should be opened up for gas extraction or not. The difference lies in who determines the value of the land. The choice is between the Bolivian state and the communities that are fighting in defence of life.

Gas is a primary common good in Bolivia’s energy mix. It is used for generating electricity, in industry, and for residential and commercial consumption. Bolivia is a gas exporter, with Argentina and Brazil as historically dominant destinations. Thus, government revenues depend on export production levels. 

Since the beginning of his administration, Paz has resorted to taking on debt to cover the shortfall. Under a program called “Smart Energy Capitalism,” he has eliminated hydrocarbon subsidies and imported and distributed large volumes of gasoline and diesel, while simultaneously attempting to open the energy sector to private capital. On August 17, he issued Decree 5676, removing the diesel subsidy for large consumers, a measure designed to reduce import costs.

The government’s “energy transition” approach aims to explore in territories with probable gas deposits, such as the Tariquía biosphere. This exploration of new areas is presented as a strategy to restore national production and revenue.

In this sense, the dispute over the Tariquía Reserve can be analyzed as a struggle between two ways of calculating value. The first involves viewing territory as a source of hydrocarbon revenue, and the second as a space for the reproduction of life.

The Tariquía Flora and Fauna Reserve is a fragile ecosystem home to 22 rural communities whose daily lives are sustained through coexistence with the non-human world. Their balanced management of this protected area has ensured the preservation of the humid, biodiverse forest.

By virtue of the ecosystem’s self-sustaining capacity, the Tariquía reserve guarantees ecological processes, regulates and supplies water, conserves soil, maintains biodiversity, and regulates climate and carbon cycles. These functions guarantee the material conditions necessary to sustain life—not only for human and non-human communities in Tariquía but also for the rest of the country.

These supports to the regulation of air and climate cycles cannot be quantified and do not appear in the state’s economic accounts. In contrast, subsurface gas is a quantifiable commodity. 

The communities of Tariquía have been opposing the entry of oil companies into the Reserve for more than a decade. For its part, the Paz administration has committed to reactivating the Domo Oso X3 well, the potential of which would be proven through drilling and exploration.

To date, there have been a series of controversies surrounding the new well—located as it is in the buffer zone to the watersheds’ headwaters —and regarding the validity of the consultation process for the project’s approval.

Most recently, YPFB-PETROBRAS’ attempts at approving the new environmental management plan while insisting on promoting its proposal has generated further conflict among the communities of Tariquía.

Tariquía on the chopping block

We are navigating the threshold of a time wherein the harshness of structural conditions facilitates a process of social fascistization. We saw how, during the last conflict—roadblocks that lasted more than a month in many parts of the country—the most reactionary tendencies also surfaced.

In a country with a history of struggles for the common good, we have learned that the crisis of social reproduction requires us to return to debates within our networks, neighborhoods and communities. Today, our task is to understand the fuel shortages, inflation, and rising prices of basic necessities so that we can become responsible for the social issues on which the reproduction of our collective life depends.

Politicizing the terms of our sustainability as well as Bolivia’s current dependence on oil and gas revenues places at the center the importance of the territorial defense struggles of Tariquía’s communities.

Our quality of life depends on the forest’s ecosystem and metabolic flows, as well as on the communities that, in harmony with the forest, work and sustain their lives there. We benefit more from preserving and defending Taríquia than from the capitalist plunder carried out by the Bolivian state and its transnational allies.

This debate is not just environmental, it is economic and political. The ecological benefits are incalculable compared to the profits from hydrocarbon revenues. If these benefits are preserved, the lives of future generations can be sustained. On the other hand, if the government extracts the gas, it will be depleted. Its cycle is finite.

The end of the gas cycle highlights the role of rentier policies across the span of government regimes, from openly neoliberal to progressive. The current model of accumulation has historically benefited capitalist entrepreneurs by granting them subsidies and expanding the frontiers of development through the opening of protected areas to oil and gas activity. It’s a disgrace!

If the fuel shortage affects all levels of social reproduction and life, then precariousness is not a fringe phenomenon, but the norm—and it affects us all. After all, who are the managers of this state of precariousness? Who benefits most from the extractivist accumulation model?

While we know that the Bolivian economy depends on global markets, it is not our destiny to remain eternally dependent on raw-material exports.

We need a genuine energy transition paradigm that challenges this dependence and regulates production,  distribution, and consumption flows. The Paz administration’s proposal for diversification deepens dependence. 

Today’s problems, created by extractivist development that strips the land and communities of their resources, leave us facing a complex and unsustainable future. The societal, energy, and environmental costs incurred when these territories are dispossessed of their resources can no longer be hidden behind sectoral or environmental narratives. Let’s get back to the debate and set the record straight to prevent the Paz administration from tearing apart the communities of Tariquía.

The energy crisis is not merely a shortage of fuel or natural resources; rather, it calls into question the very model of accumulation. Who benefits, and at whose expense?

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This article was originally published by Ojalá; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.

Claudia López Pardo

Claudia López Pardo lives in Bolivia. She’s a part of anti-patriarchal weavings and struggles. She writes about the struggles of renewed feminisms in a situated way.