The ‘We Want our World Back’ conference organized by the Network for an Alternative Quest and AStA Universität Hamburg opened on Thursday evening despite the last minute withdrawal of the rooms by the University.

The conference can be followed on streaming here

Opening of the conference 

The conference will be attended by more than 1300 people and world-famous scientists like John Holloway and speakers like María de Jesús Patricio Martínez and is part of the series "Challenging Capitalist Modernity". It has been hosted at the University of Hamburg three times already, most recently in 2017, and is organized by the AStA of the University of Hamburg in cooperation with the Network for an Alternative Quest. Participants from academia, social movements, and the Hamburg student body will discuss pressing issues of our time such as the climate crisis, alternatives to capitalism, and patriarchal violence together in workshops and panel events. To enable international participation, the conference will be simultaneously translated into English, Kurdish, German, Turkish, Italian, Spanish and Arabic. This convergence space for science and civil society, as well as the truly international character of the conference are unique. However, the university president, Hauke Heekeren, does not seem to appreciate this pluralism. 

The Network for an Alternative Quest was formed to build bridges between the Kurds and different and alternative movements and thoughts in a context as a response to the need to discuss the Kurdish Freedom Movement (KFM) and its relations to other movements and emerging struggles around the world. Conferences that addressed the key ideological and philosophical issues of our times and KFM’s position on it were organized for this purpose.