Rojava (Syrian-Kurdistan) as a borderland in civil war With the takeover of the Kurdish areas in Syria by Kurdish forces and the start of the civil war in Syria struggles between different Kurdish parties (members of the KNC and PYD/PKK-affiliated groups) intensified. This lecture gives an overview over the different Kurdish (and non-Kurdish) political actors in Syrian-Kurdistan (Rojava) and their interdependence with other political forces within Syria and outside of Syria. Therefore it focuses also on the question of borders and borderlands. After the PKK-affiliate PYD took over Rojava most of the legal border crossings between Turkey and the Syria were closed. Simultaneously, due to the civil war the supply of food, fuel and heating material became much more difficult. On the other side also the border crossings between Syrian-Kurdistan and Iraqi-Kurdistan became part of a power struggle between the Iraqi KRG and Barzanis PDK on one side and the PYD on the other side. Consequently this made the illegal or informal crossing of borders crucial for the Syrian Kurds. Informal border crossing became also important for refugees to leave Syria. However, the borders of Syria are often just the first border these refugees have to cross. A mass grave in Amudê demonstrates the deadly consequences of the Fortress Europe for many of these refugees. With the growing conflict between the PKK-affiliated PYD and the Kurdish parties of the Kurdish National Congress, the control of smugglers routs became part of the intra-Kurdish power struggle in Syria. This lecture will light up the importance of the border and the control of informal routs through the Turkish-Syrian border for the intra-Kurdish power struggle in Syria. It is based on first hand fieldwork (an illegal border crossing from Turkey to Syria and back in 2013 and another research in Syrian-Kurdistan in 2014), interviews with representatives of different Syrian-Kurdish parties and observations in Syrian-Kurdistan and the border regions of the Kurdish regions in Turkey. It is a very timely paper and there is hardly any scientific literature to find about it. However, the observations in the field will be connected with theoretical considerations about borderlands and their function for migration, political power, stateness and para-stateness, based on the state theory of Nicos Poulantzas and neo-Poulantzian perspectives.