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.