There is an ongoing social and political transformation in Syrian Kurdistan (Rojava). Those living in Syria’s Rojava cantons are establishing a communally organized democracy which they call ‘democratic autonomy’. It rejects capitalism, reactionary ethnic or nationalist ideology and is radically feminist. My paper will examine this movement by using the insights of the Global South literature, a perspective rarely discussed in the context of the Middle East. The Global South scholarship has not only aimed to challenge how we discuss notions such as globalization, modernity and social justice, but has questioned Northern epistemologies, especially how the North conceptualizes, and problematically reproduces, North-centric discourses on such processes. The epistemological interventions of the Global South literature have thus sought to show that traditional Euro-centric ways of knowing have created an ‘epistemic violence’ on others (e.g. criticisms put forward by Mignolo 2011; Santos 2014) whilst simultaneously creating a narrowly bounded European history and an inadequate understanding of modernity and of today (e.g. criticisms put forward by Bhambra 1997; Chakrabarty 2000). The paper will examine the extent to which the Global South literature can be deployed to understand Syrian Kurdistan. It will also assess the similarities between the cultural-political mobilizations in Latin America and Syrian Kurdistan. This is because, as part of the Global South, such movements in disparate parts of the world aim to challenge Northern epistemologies’ assumptions about ‘native’ populations, and seek to enter into the international order.