Red Emma’s

Many on the radical left have drawn inspiration from Rojava without ever having occasion to seriously engage the political organization that built it. This panel offers that engagement: fifty years of the PKK, the current peace process with the Republic of Turkey, and what the campaign for Öcalan's freedom looks like in 2026. The democratic confederalism practiced in Northern Syria did not emerge in a vacuum: it was forged through the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and its decades-long resistance against what Kurdish writers including panelist Rebwar Rashed have characterized as Turkey's recurrent slide into fascism.

The panel deliberately combines three registers: rigorous historical documentation from Aliza Marcus, active political analysis from the Kurdish National Congress through Rebwar Rashed, and a firsthand encounter with the PKK from an earlier era from Colin Patrick Starger. Together they will examine the PKK's organizational and ideological transformation, the campaign for Abdullah Öcalan's freedom, and the contradictions of the current peace process.

Panelists:

• Aliza Marcus, Author of Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence _and the newly released _Resurgence and Revolution: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight in Turkey and Syria (NYU Press, May 2026). Formerly an international correspondent for The Boston Globe, Marcus covered the PKK for more than eight years as a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor and Reuters, receiving a National Press Club Award and a MacArthur Foundation grant for her work.
• Rebwar Rashed, Co-Chair of the Kurdish National Congress (KNK, transnational political body representing Kurdish movements across all parts of Kurdistan). Holding a Ph.D. in Political Science, he has translated several books into Kurdish and written extensively on the Kurdistan National Liberation Movement, human rights, and democratic struggle. He is a frequent contributor to the Kurdistan Tribune.
• Colin Patrick Starger, Professor of Law & Director of the Legal Data & Design Clinic at the University of Baltimore. Notably for tonight's discussion, he is the only U.S. citizen to have ever been abducted by the PKK. A graduate of Columbia Law School, Starger has a distinguished career rooted in justice; as a former Staff Attorney at the Innocence Project, he was lead counsel on four DNA exonerations, including saving a man from Oklahoma's death row. A recognized innovator in the legal field, he leads the software-driven SCOTUS Mapping Project and was named a 2020 American Bar Association “Legal Rebel.”
• Facilitator: Stephen Flint Arthur, Solidarity activist with Kurdistan, active with the U.S. Mission of the Syrian Democratic Council, with which he traveled to Rojava in 2019. Claimant in Kurd v. Republic of Turkey following his 2017 assault by Turkish security personnel attached to President Erdoğan's delegation in Washington, D.C. Senior moderator of r/Kurdistan (56k members) and previously facilitator of several Kurdish-related events at Red Emma's.

This discussion will also be the Baltimore book launch for Aliza Marcus's new book Resurgence and Revolution: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight in Turkey and Syria published May 2026 with NYU Press.