Revolutionary Self-Defense as a Rival Ethics of Nonviolence: Rojava and Kurdish Liberation

Abstract

Rojava has recently received significant global attention thanks to the victories achieved there by the revolutionary Kurdish militia controlling the region and its Women’s Protection Units against ISIS. An international community that has long been silent about Kurdish oppression was suddenly fascinated by the Rojava revolution and its potential for women’s liberation. But this current interest elides vital political and conceptual contributions of activists in Rojava and elsewhere in Kurdistan, and reinscribes the orientalist and imperial scripts invoked in the representation of the emancipatory politics of the region’s peoples. Pushing against these frameworks, this paper examines the new method of Kurdish decolonization, “democratic confederalism,” as a distinct and perhaps novel contribution to the global repertoire of anticolonial thought and practice, especially with its re-envisioning of the revolutionary role violence and nonviolence can play in liberation. Tracing the intellectual and political process that turned decolonizing Kurds from the pursuit of a territorial nation-state towards the revolutionary and feminist transformation of colonized sites and lives, it distinguishes this decolonial politics and its central means of community self-defense from both its reactionary opposites and revolutionary siblings. Foregrounding its foundationally anti-nationalist character, the paper proposes to approach this revolutionary, egalitarian, and community based self-defense as a rival ethics of nonviolence.

Acknowledgement

The author thanks the anonymous reviewers and Lucas G. Pinheiro for their helpful comments and recommendations on an earlier version of the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Djene Rhys Bajalan, “The Clintons Are Making a TV Show About Female Kurdish Fighters. That’s Absurd,” Jacobin, January 2021.

2 Rojava includes three cantons: Afrin or Efrin in the West, Kobanê in the middle, and Cizre in the East. These cantons cooperated with other local pro-democracy forces and the international community and allies including revolutionaries, Marxist-Leninists, and anarchists who traveled to Rojava to join the fight against the jihadists from Turkey as well as Europe and other parts of the world. Approximately 400 leftists are reported to have joined the Kurds as part of this effort in 2015. Yasin Duman, Rojava - Bir Demokratik Özerklik Deneyimi (Istanbul: Iletisim Yayinlari, 2016), 84.

3 Lesley Goldberg, “Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Developing Female Kurdish Militia Drama for TV,” Hollywood Reporter, January 25, 2021, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/hillary-and-chelsea-clinton-developing-female-kurdish-militia-drama-for-tv-4120711/.

4 Goldberg.

5 Bajalan, “The Clintons Are Making a TV Show About Female Kurdish Fighters. That’s Absurd.”; Djene Rhys Bajalan, “Between Rojava and Washington,” Jacobin, 2016; Dilar Dirik, “Western Fascination with ‘Badass’ Kurdish Women,” Al Jazeera, October 29, 2014; Edward Hunt, “The US Is Trying to Undermine the Kurds’ Revolutionary Ambitions,” Jacobin, 2021, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/01/kurds-revolution-syria-turkey-rojava-us-trump.

6 The PYD is part of Syria’s National Coordinating Body for Social Change (NCB), which supports the restructuring of Syria in the form of democratic pluralism. Founded in 2011, the NCB is against foreign military involvement in the region. While supporting the NCB, the PYD rejects the legitimacy of the Syrian National Council, another institutional body founded in Turkey to respond to the Syrian civil war with the backing of western powers including the U.S. Joost Jongerden and Ahmet Hamdi Akkaya, “Democratic Confederalism as s Kurdish Spring: The PKK and the Quest for Radical Democracy,” in The Kurdish Spring, ed. Mohammed M.A. Ahmed and Michael M. Gunter (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2013), 163–85.

7 Ironically perhaps, Öcalan was captured in a Greek embassy in Kenya with the help of U.S. intelligence during the presidency of Bill Clinton. Tim Weiner, “U.S. Helped Turkey Find and Capture Kurd Rebel,” New York Times, 1999; Mehmed Ali Birand, “10 Years Later, the Story of Öcalan’s Capture,” Hürriyet, March 4, 2009. Since 9/11, both the European Union and the United States have also been calling for unconditionally disarmament of the PKK. Andy Hilton, Marlies Casier, and Joost Jongerden, “‘Road Maps’ and Roadblocks in Turkey’s Southeast,” MERIP, October 30, 2008.

8 Since his imprisonment in 1999, Öcalan wrote 10 books which have all helped further shape the Kurdish struggle. Vanessa Baird, “Mandela of the Middle East?,” New Internationalist, July 10, 2020. While Rojava is the site of the most successful implementation of Öcalan’s new vision, PKK militants and Kurdish activists are putting the same principles into practice in Turkish Kurdistan and in Kurdish refugee camps in Northern Iraq.

9 Abdullah Öcalan, War and Peace in Kurdistan (Cologne: International Initiative: Freedom for Öcalan, 2008); Nazan Üstündağ and Güney Yildiz, “The Kurdish Movement,” in Authoritarianism and Resistance in Turkey: Conversations on Democratic and Social Challenges, ed. Esra Özyürek, Gaye Özpınar, and Emrah Altındiş (Cham: Springer, 2018), 155–69; Bülent Küçük and Ceren Özselçuk, “The Rojava Experience: Possibilities and Challenges of Building a Democratic Life,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 1 184–96 (115AD); Wes Enzinna, “Bizarre and Wonderful: Murray Bookchin, Eco-Anarchist,” London Review of Books, May 2004.

10 Ahmet Hamdi Akkaya and Joost Jongerden, “The PKK in the 2000s: Continuity through Breaks?,” in Nationalisms and Politics in Turkey: Political Islam, Kemalism and the Kurdish Issue, ed. Marlies Casier and Joost Jongerden (New York: Routledge, 2010), 143–62.

11 İsmail Beşikçi, Devletlerarasi Sömürge Kürdistan (Ankara: Yurt Kitap Yayın, 1991).

12 Recently, however, a younger generation of scholars in Kurdish and Turkish studies have increasingly begun to approach the Kurdish question from the perspective of colonialism and anticolonization. For this scholarship, see for instance Deniz Duruiz, “Tracing the Conceptual Genealogy of Kurdistan as International Colony,” MERIP, 2020; Deniz Yonucu, “Colonial Envy and the Unbearable Success of the Kurdish Political Struggle,” Association for Political and Legal Anthropology, 2017, https://politicalandlegalanthro.org/2017/05/11/colonial-envy-and-the-unbearable-success-of-the-kurdish-political-struggle/; Üstündağ and Yildiz, “The Kurdish Movement”; Umut Yıldırım, “Space, Loss and Resistance: A Haunted Pool-Map in South- Eastern Turkey,” Anthropological Theory 19, no. 4 (2019): 440–469; Eray Çaylı, “Bear Witness: Embedded Coverage of Turkey’s Urban Warfare and the Demarcation of Sovereignty against a Dynamic Exterior,” Theory & Event 19, no. 1 (2016)https://muse.jhu.edu/article/610225; Haydar Darıcı, “Of Kurdish Youth and Ditches,” Theory & Event 19, no. 1 (2016), https://muse.jhu.edu/article/610226; Zeynep Türkyılmaz, “Maternal Colonialism and Turkish Woman’s Burden in Dersim: Educating the ‘Mountain Flowers’ of Dersim,” Journal of Women’s History 28, no. 3 (2016): 162–86; Welat Zeydanlıog˘lu, “‘The White Turkish Man’s Burden’: Orientalism, Kemalism and the Kurds in Turkey,” in Neo-Colonial Mentalities in Contemporary Europe? Language and Discourse in the Construction of Identities, ed. Anne Ife and Guido Rings (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), 155–74; Güllistan Yarkın, “İnkâr Edilen Hakikat: Sömürge Kuzey Kürdistan,” Kürd Araştırmaları 1 (2019): 45–69; Zeynep Gambetti and Joost Jongerden, “The Spatial (Re)Production of the Kurdish Issue: Multiple and Contradicting Trajectories—Introduction,” Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies 13, no. 4 (2011): 375–88.

13 Barnor Hesse and Juliet Hooker, “On Black Political Thought inside Global Black Protest,” South Atlantic Quarterly 116, no. 3 (2017): 449.

14 I borrow this phrase from Üstündağ, who formulated it in light of her interviews with the Kurdish guerilla in Rojava.

15 Joost Jongerden and Ahmet Hamdi Akkaya, “Born from the Left: The Making of the PKK,” in Nationalisms and Politics in Turkey: Political Islam, Kemalism and the Kurdish Issue, ed. Marlies Casier and Joost Jongerden (New York: Routledge, 2010), 123–42; Cengiz Gunes, The Kurdish National Movement in Turkey: From Protest to Resistance (London: Routledge, 2012); Üstündağ and Yildiz, “The Kurdish Movement.”

16 Jongerden and Akkaya, “Born from the Left: The Making of the PKK”; Hamit Bozarslan, “Kurds and the Turkish State,” in The Cambridge History of Turkey Volume 4: Turkey in the Modern World, ed. Reşat Kasaba (New York: Cambridge UP, 2008), 333–56; Hamit Bozarslan, “Between Integration, Autonomization and Radicalization. Hamit Bozarslan on the Kurdish Movement and the Turkish Left Interview by Marlies Casier and Olivier Grojean,” European Journal of Turkish Studies 14 (2012): 1–16.

17 Ruwayda Mustafah Rabar, “What Is the Kurdish Question?,” Open Democracy, September 23, 2011. For the Turkish context see Mesut Yeg˘en, “The Kurdish Question in Turkey Denial to Recognition,” in Nationalisms and Politics in Turkey: Political Islam, Kemalism and the Kurdish Issue, ed. Marlies Casier and Joost Jongerden (Routledge, 2010), 67–84.

18 Yeg˘en, “The Kurdish Question in Turkey Denial to Recognition”; Mesut Yeğen, “‘Prospective Turks’ or ‘Pseudo-Citizens’: Kurds in Turkey’,” Middle East Journal 63, no. 4 (2009): 597–615.

19 For an analysis of the radicalism and distinctiveness of Turkish colonization of Kurdistan on this account of denialism, see Beşikçi, Devletlerarasi Sömürge Kürdistan; Duruiz, “Tracing the Conceptual Genealogy of Kurdistan as International Colony.”

20 Yeğen, “‘Prospective Turks’ or ‘Pseudo-Citizens’: Kurds in Turkey’”; Welat Zeydanlıog˘lu, “Torture and Turkification in the Diyarbakır Military Prison,” in Rights, Citizenship & Torture: Perspectives on Evil, Law and the State, ed. Welat Zeydanlıoğlu and John T. Parry (Oxford: Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2009), 73–92.

21 Quoted in Dilek Kurban, Limits of Supranational Justice: The European Court of Human Rights and Turkey’s Kurdish Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 86.

22 İsmail Beşikçi, Kürtlerin Mecbur İskanı Bilim Yöntemi Türkiye’deki Uygulama (Istanbul: Ismail Besikci Vakfi Yayinlari, 2013); Turgay Ünalan, “Internal Displacement: Current Global Conditions and Trends,” in Coming to Terms with Forced Migration: Post-Displacement Restitution of Citizenship Rights in Turkey, ed. Dilek Kurban et al. (Istanbul: TESEV, 2007), 33–43; Martin van Bruinessen, “Historical Background,” in Violations of Human Rights in Turkish Kurdistan. Report of a Fact-Finding Mission of Pax Christi and the Netherlands Kurdistan Society to Newroz 1993 (Amsterdam: Netherlands Kurdistan Society, 1996), 1–8; Zeynep Türkyılmaz, “Dersim Soykırımı ve ‘Kötülüğün Sıradanlığı,’” Agos, November 29, 2019.

23 “Turkey Moves to Ban Pro-Kurdish HDP Opposition Party,” BBC World, March 17, 2021.

24 Ziad Abu-Rish, “Turkish Politics, Kurdish Rights, and the KCK Operations: An Interview with Asli Bali,” Jadaliyya, 2011.

25 As a university student in Ankara in early 1970s, Öcalan was a member of a Revolutionary Youth or DEV-YOL branch, which later evolved into The People’s Liberation Party-Front of Turkey or THKP-C. He was influenced particularly by Mahir Çayan, the communist leader of THKP-C, who was killed in an ambush by the Turkish army in 1972.

26 Gunes, The Kurdish National Movement in Turkey: From Protest to Resistance, 92–93. The PKK saw Kurdish subjugation to be intensified by feudal landowners and “comprador bourgeoisie” that betrayed their national identity by collaborating with the colonizers and made these collaborator some of their first targets in the decolonization struggle. M Van Bruinessen, “Between Guerilla War and Political Murder: The Workers Party of Kurdistan,” MERIP, 1988, https://merip.org/1988/07/between-guerrilla-warfare-and-political-murder/.

27 Beşikçi, Devletlerarasi Sömürge Kürdistan; Barış Ünlü, “Ismail Besikci as a Discomforting Intellectual,” Borderlands 11, no. 2 (2012): 1–21; Bozarslan, “Between Integration, Autonomization and Radicalization. Hamit Bozarslan on the Kurdish Movement and the Turkish Left Interview by Marlies Casier and Olivier Grojean.”

28 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York, NY: Grove Press, 2005).

29 For a poignant reading of the Kurdish situation and the meaning of the PKK’s violence from a Fanonian angle see in particular, Beşikçi, Devletlerarasi Sömürge Kürdistan, 67–70. For a similar discussion, see also Bozarslan, “Between Integration, Autonomization and Radicalization. Hamit Bozarslan on the Kurdish Movement and the Turkish Left Interview by Marlies Casier and Olivier Grojean.” and Jongerden, “The PKK in the 2000s: Continuity through Breaks?,” 132–35. For a discussion of Öcalan’s own assessment of the role of violence in Kurdish liberation, see 32. Gün Arşivi, “Abdullah Öcalan Röportajı” (Turkey, 1992), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJ91JxQJt44&ab_channel=32.GünArşivi.

30 Bozarslan, “Kurds and the Turkish State,” 352. See also Van Bruinessen, “Between Guerilla War and Political Murder: The Workers Party of Kurdistan” and David McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996).

31 Van Bruinessen, “Between Guerilla War and Political Murder: The Workers Party of Kurdistan;” Chris Kutschera, “Mad Dreams of Independence The Kurds of Turkey and the PKK,” MERIP, 1994.

32 Zerrin Özlem Biner, States of Dispossession: Violence and Precarious Coexistence in Southeast Turkey (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), 9.

33 Bozarslan, “Kurds and the Turkish State,” 352.

34 Hilton, Casier, and Jongerden, “‘Road Maps’ and Roadblocks in Turkey’s Southeast.”

35 Öcalan, War and Peace in Kurdistan.

36 Enzinna, “Bizarre and Wonderful: Murray Bookchin, Eco-Anarchist.” For libertarian municipalism, see Murray Bookchin, The Rise of Urbanisation and the Decline of Citizenship (San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 1987); Murray Bookchin, Urbanization Without Cities: The Rise and Decline of Citizenship (New York: Black Rose Books, 1992).

37 Quoted in Akkaya and Jongerden, “The PKK in the 2000s: Continuity through Breaks?,” 153.

38 Akkaya and Jongerden, 153.

39 This redistribution is commonly undertaken by the Komîteya Aboriyê (Economics Committee) of the umbrella organization The Movement for a Democratic Society (Kurdish: Tevgera Civaka Demokratîk‎) or TEV-DEM, which is tied to PYD.

40 Baird, “Mandela of the Middle East?”

41 In a letter he wrote to Bookchin in 2004, Öcalan told him that he “had acquired a good understanding of his work, and was eager to make the ideas applicable to Middle Eastern societies."Enzinna, “Bizarre and Wonderful: Murray Bookchin, Eco-Anarchist.”

42 Jongerden and Akkaya, “Democratic Confederalism as s Kurdish Spring: The PKK and the Quest for Radical Democracy,” 173. Duman further notes that many members of the PKK who were from Rojava returned there after 2007 to lead the new political experiment. Duman, Rojava - Bir Demokratik Özerklik Deneyimi, 92.

43 Amed Dicle, “Rojava’s Political Structure,” Jadaliyya, September 23, 2013.

44 Ali B., “Eroding the State in Rojava,” Theory & Event 19, no. 1 (2016), https://muse.jhu.edu/article/610227.

45 “Charter of the Social Contract in Rojava,” YPG International, accessed June 21, 2021, https://ypginternational.blackblogs.org/2016/07/01/charter-of-the-social-contract-in-rojava/. For a detailed analysis of how these diverse units operate, see Duman, Rojava - Bir Demokratik Özerklik Deneyimi, 79–119. The revolution’s commitment to multi-ethnic and multi-religious self-rule is demonstrated in the self-governance structure at every level whereby responsibilities are determined by the distribution of Rojava’s diverse ethnic and religious groups. For instance, representatives from diverse ethnic groups and religions head their local communes and get elected to higher positions in district councils and canton governments. See B., “Eroding the State in Rojava.”

46 Üstündağ, “Self-Defense as a Revolutionary Practice in Rojava, or How to Unmake the State,” 202–3. See also “Charter of the Social Contract in Rojava (Syria),” 2014; “The Constitution of the Rojava Cantons,” 2014, https://civiroglu.net/the-constitution-of-the-rojava-cantons/.

47 Küçük and Özselçuk, “The Rojava Experience: Possibilities and Challenges of Building a Democratic Life,” 187.

48 Abdullah Öcalan, The Political Thought of Abdullah Öcalan: Kurdistan, Woman’s Revolution and Democratic Confederalism (London: Pluto Press, 2017), 57–96.

49 Öcalan, War and Peace in Kurdistan; Üstündağ, “Self-Defense as a Revolutionary Practice in Rojava, or How to Unmake the State.”

50 Küçük and Özselçuk, “The Rojava Experience: Possibilities and Challenges of Building a Democratic Life,” 190–93.

51 Dicle, “Rojava’s Political Structure.”

52 Dicle.

53 Küçük and Özselçuk, “The Rojava Experience: Possibilities and Challenges of Building a Democratic Life,” 193.

54 Küçük and Özselçuk, 193.

55 Duman, Rojava - Bir Demokratik Özerklik Deneyimi, 88–89.

56 Duman, 82–84. For education textbooks in Rojava see Pinar Dinc, “The Content of School Textbooks in (Nation) States and ‘Stateless Autonomies’: A Comparison of Turkey and the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (Rojava),” Nations and Nationalisms, 26, 2020: 994–1014, https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/nana.12608.

57 Duman, Rojava - Bir Demokratik Özerklik Deneyimi, 102.

58 Wes Enzinna, “Kurdish Syria: A Dream of Secular Utopia in ISIS’ Backyard,” New York Times, November 24, 2015.

59 Üstündağ, “Self-Defense as a Revolutionary Practice in Rojava, or How to Unmake the State,” 205.

60 Duman, Rojava - Bir Demokratik Özerklik Deneyimi, 89.

61 Chad Kautzer, “A Political Philosophy of Self-Defense,” Boston Review, February 1, 2018.

62 Üstündağ, “Self-Defense as a Revolutionary Practice in Rojava, or How to Unmake the State,” 206.

63 Duman, Rojava - Bir Demokratik Özerklik Deneyimi, 109.

64 For an analysis of these structures, see Duman, 110–12.

65 Malcolm X., “Any Means Necessary” (1964).

66 Jongerden and Akkaya, “Born from the Left: The Making of the PKK”; Bozarslan, “Between Integration, Autonomization and Radicalization. Hamit Bozarslan on the Kurdish Movement and the Turkish Left Interview by Marlies Casier and Olivier Grojean.”

67 As the writings of these activists and recent studies have shown, Black revolutionaries such as the Panthers and civil rights activists in particular did profess internationalist anticolonial imaginations. Their struggle was at once nationalist, in terms of its commitment to self-determination, and transnationalist, in terms of the intellectual and literal connections they formed with Third World liberation movements and their internationalist vision of emancipation. My intention here is not to disavow this point but rather to emphasize that Kurdish decolonization practiced in Rojava goes a step further here with its founding commitment to antinationalism. For the transnationalism of U.S. Civil Rights activists, see in particular Erin R. Pineda, Seeing Like an Activist Civil Disobedience and the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 53–91.

68 For an account claiming thats the commitment to the elimination of the state form and nationalism in Rojava is incomplete, see Pinar Dinc, “The Kurdish Movement and the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria: An Alternative to the (Nation-)State Model?,” Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies 22, no. 1 (2020): 47–67.

69 In 2014 and 2015, prominent human rights organizations Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International raised accusations of forced displacement of Arabs and Turkmens as well as of inhuman treatment, arbitrary arrest, unjust conscription policies against the PYD. Human Rights Watch, “Under Kurdish Rule Abuses in PYD-Run Enclaves of Syria,” 2014; Amnesty International, “We Had Nowhere Else to Go’: Forced Displacement and Demolition in Northern Syria,” 2015. The PYD and independent journalists refute these accusations and raise suspicion about the sources affiliated with the Assad regime that the reports are mainly based on. Foreign Relations body of Democratic Self-rule Administration - Rojava, “The Democratic Self-Rule Administration’s Response to the Report of Human Rights Watch Organization,” n.d.; Fehim Taştekin, “Hıristiyanlar Kürtlere Niye Çıkıştı?,” Radikal, November 11, 2015, http://www.radikal.com.tr/yazarlar/fehim-tastekin/hiristiyanlar-kurtlere-niye-cikisti-1470112/.

70 Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, “How the World Is Proving Martin Luther King Right about Nonviolence,” Washington Post, January 18, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/01/18/how-the-world-is-proving-mlk-right-about-nonviolence/; “Biden Condemns Both Racism and Violence Because He Isn’t Crazy,” Intelligencer, August 26, 2020, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/08/biden-condemns-violence-riots-looting-kenosha-jacob-blake-racism-police.html; Sara Cline, “Portland Leaders Condemn Ongoing Violence by ‘Anarchists,’” Associated Press, March 15, 2020; Paul Bedard, “Most Say ‘Protests’ Have Become ‘Riots,’ New High in Support for Police,” Washington Secret, August 18, 2020; Erica Chenoweth, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict,” (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).

71 Mustafa Barghouthi, “Peaceful Protest Can Free Palestine,” New York Times, February 21, 2012; Eric Weiner, “Palestinians Need a Gandhi, Not a New Arafat,” Los Angeles Times, November 10, 2004, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2004-nov-10-oe-weiner10-story.html; Noah Feldman, “Imagine a Palestinian Movement Led by Gandhi,” Bloomberg Opinion, December 27, 2017; Mihir Sharma, “Black Lives Matter Protests Can Work If They Use Gandhian Tactics and Stay Peaceful,” The Print, June 4, 2020, https://theprint.in/opinion/black-lives-matter-protests-can-work-if-they-use-gandhian-tactics-and-stay-peaceful/435235/; Richard Lischer, “What Martin Luther King Jr. Would Think of Black Lives Matter Today,” Washington Post, April 4, 2018.

72 Alexander Livingston, “Power for the Powerless: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Late Theory of Civil Disobedience,” Journal of Politics 82, no. 2 (2020): 700–713; Alex Gourevitch, “When King Was Dangerous,” Jacobin, 2019; Pineda, Seeing Like an Activist Civil Disobedience and the Civil Rights Movement; Omid Safi, “Stop Weaponizing Dr. King Against Black Lives Matter Protestors,” Medium, June, https://gen.medium.com/stop-weaponizing-dr-king-against-black-lives-matter-protestors-87f88784173a.

73 Üstündağ, “Self-Defense as a Revolutionary Practice in Rojava, or How to Unmake the State,” 207.

74 Üstündağ, 198.

75 Bonnie Honig, “How to Do Things with Inclination: Antigones, with Cavarero,” in Toward a Feminist Ethics of Nonviolence 2021 (New Haven: Fordham University Press, n.d.), 82.