This week, my colleague Aras Yussef and I have a piece out at the Wilson Center looking at the results of a survey of women co-chairs in northeast Syria that we conducted earlier this year. There are few places in the world where women have achieved the kind of institutionalized parity in political leadership that women in the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES) enjoy. We wanted to investigate what that parity looked like in practice to better understand how to advance women’s leadership elsewhere and help northeast Syria’s women continue to improve their model.

I won’t go into our findings here — you can read the original study for that, and view the incredible portrait series by Clara Bennet that appears alongside it. To contextualize that report, I wanted to explain a bit more about how women achieved these remarkable outcomes.

One of the factors that may explain why northeast Syria leads the region on metrics of women’s participation is the presence of an organized and disciplined women’s movement there. The co-chair system is one of the policy demands that this movement formulated, advocated for, and won.

Co-chairing was first implemented by pro-Kurdish political parties in Turkey. In 2004, the Democratic Society Party (DTP) elected Aysel Tugluk and Ahmet Turk as its co-chairs.

Tugluk described the many challenges that women overcame to institutionalize co-chairing. Some men in the party and in the community were not used to women in positions of power and did not see her as a leader in her own right. Some women lacked confidence and experience and, consequently, were afraid to step up.

Ultimately, she wrote, co-chairing was “institutionalized” and “achieved a legal basis” in pro-Kurdish politics in Turkey. By 2014, the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), a DTP successor, was led by co-chairs at the national level and also ran co-mayor candidates for every municipality that it contested in local elections. The Peoples’ Equality and Democracy (DEM) Party, the current representative of the pro-Kurdish political movement, maintains this policy today.

The Democratic Union Party (PYD), the main Kurdish political force behind the establishment of an autonomous region in northeast Syria, implemented co-chairing before Syria’s civil war began. When it formed the Democratic Society Movement (TEV-DEM) in 2011, co-chairing was included as a model of leadership at the request of Yekitiya Star (now Kongra Star), the PYD’s autonomous women’s branch. The Peoples’ Council of Western Kurdistan (MGRK) elected its first co-chairs when it was established in 2012.

However, co-chairing was not universal in the nascent autonomous region. Instead, many regional and local institutions had one president and one or more vice-presidents. Inclusion was a priority: typically, at least one of these officials would be a woman, and the president and vice-presidents would each represent different ethnic and religious groups. I hope to expand the role of the co-chair system in promoting ethnic and religious pluralism in further writing and research.

When the Democratic Autonomous Administration was established in 2014, two of its three cantons — Kobane and Jazira — had male presidents and at least one female vice-president. Hevi Mustafa, a Kurdish woman from the Alevi religious minority, was elected president of Afrin Canton. In the remarkable book Bingehê Dîrokî û Siberoja Şoreşa Jinê [The Historical Basis and Future of the Women’s Revolution], published by the Jineoloji Academy, she recounts her experiences.

“When the Syrian regime was in power, no one could think about making their own decisions, not just women. Decisions were made in Damascus, everyone else could only implement them,” Mustafa recalled.

“I was very worried in that first year. I would always say to myself, ‘Let there not be any flaws. Let no one be able to say, look, the president of Afrin Canton is a woman, see how the work there is weak.”

In 2016, the three cantons of Rojava became the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria. As elected officials and community leaders gathered to write the region’s new Social Contract, women proposed that the co-chair system be enshrined in law.

The existing model, while radically different from the total subjugation of women under ISIS and their exclusion from real power under Bashar al-Assad’s rule, wasn’t enough to create truly equal leadership.

“The canton president was a man. He might have a woman for a deputy, but the people would remember the president and forget the deputy,” Berivan Hesen, who was elected vice-president of Kobane Canton in 2014, told me.

Some participants in the drafting process opposed this revolutionary change.

“People questioned whether it was possible for men and women to lead institutions together. Society didn’t accept it. There were very long, very deep discussions,” said Amina Omar, former co-chair of the Syrian Democratic Council (SDC), who participated in the Social Contract discussions at the time.

But the women didn’t back down. Ultimately, they won. Article 12 of the Social Contact proclaimed that northeast Syria “adopts the co-presidency system in all political, social, administrative, and other fields.”

By early 2017, the new Democratic Federation of Northern Syria and the cantons of Afrin, Kobane and Jazira within it were led jointly by male and female co-presidents. Other administrative institutions soon followed. As new territories were liberated from ISIS by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the co-chair system spread.

Today, virtually every leadership position across all Syrian territory under DAANES control is held by co-chairs, from the smallest neighborhood assembly to the administration’s Executive Council.

The most recent DAANES Social Contract, adopted in 2023, contained the same article on the co-chair system as the 2016 document. It referenced co-chairs and co-chairing a total of 55 times.

This time, Amina recounted to me, its inclusion wasn’t up for debate. “Before, [co-chairing] wasn’t accepted. The Syrian regime and the conservative views of society had an impact. But after twelve years, there was no discussion. It was a fundamental part of our administration. Because we’ve lived this experience, the system has progressed.”

(Photo: “Jamil Ali and Samiya Xelil, co-chairs of neighborhood commune,” Clara Bennet.)