'Pre-Emptive Legal Violence' | Prof. Brenna Bhandar (Professor of Law, University of British Columbia)
In this special guest lecture, Prof. Brenna Bhandar will explore pre-emptive violence as a legal technology used to foreclose alternate futures from taking hold. Focusing on 19th century land law doctrine, she will examine the way in which private (property) power and state authority worked together to shore up colonial jurisdiction, title, and sovereignty in British Columbia. Pre-emption enrolled ‘private’ actors in sustained forms of ongoing dispossession, removing the Indigenous presence from the land. Pre-emption created the conditions for violence that was ‘illegal’ on the face of the legislation yet was effectively granted impunity by colonial authorities. Pre-emptive violence appears across land law doctrines from the 19th century settler colony to the criminalization of anti-colonial resistance, and permeates the globalized racial present of counter-terrorism and securitization. Pre-emptive violence is a key mechanism to control the political time of refusal and resistance.
Event details of
'Pre-Emptive Legal Violence' | Prof. Brenna Bhandar (Professor of Law, University of British Columbia)
- Date
- 3 February 2026
- Time
- 15:30 -17:00
- Location
- Roeterseilandcampus - building A
- Room
- A3.01
About the speaker
Brenna Bhandar is Professor of Law at the University of British Columbia, situated on the unceded lands of the Musqueam First Nation. She is author of Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land and Racial Regimes of Ownership (DUP: 2018), and co-editor, with Rafeef Ziadah, of Revolutionary Feminisms: Conversations on Collective Action and Radical Thought (Verso: 2020).
This talk is organised by Dr. Kanad Bagchi (postdoctoral fellow at SEVEN, UvA) and Dr. Vladimir Bogoeski (Assistant Professor in European Private Law, UvA) with funding from the RPA Decolonial Futures.
For questions please contact the organisers: k.bagchi@uva.nl or v.bogoeski@uva.nl
