Keynote lectures

Alberto Toscano

Relations of Destruction:
Dismantling racial fascism in the 21st century

This talk will outline some of the lessons to be drawn from anticolonial, Black radical, and “Third World” theories of fascism for our own violent and volatile historical moment. It will focus on the intimate bond between fascist politics, the ongoing "primitive accumulation" of capital, and the making disposable of racialized surplus populations, while foregrounding the necessary convergence of anticolonial and antifascist struggles.

• Alberto Toscano is the author, most recently, of Communism in Philosophy: Essays on Alain Badiou and Toni Negri (2025), Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis (2023), and Terms of Disorder: Keywords for an Interregnum (2023). He teaches at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and is a columnist for In These Times.

Brenna Bhandar

Pre-emptive Legal Violence 

In this talk, Brenna Bhandar explores pre-emptive violence as a legal technique used to prevent alternative futures from taking hold. Pre-emptive violence appears across land law doctrines from the 19th-century settler colonies to the criminalization of anticolonial resistance and permeates the globalized racial present of counterterrorism and securitization. Pre-emptive violence is a key mechanism for controlling the political times of refusal and resistance.

• Brenna Bhandar is a 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). 

These lectures are part of Figures of Fascism and Antifascist Solidarity. Click here for the full programme.