This book is dedicated to the tireless efforts of all those past and present who have devoted their life’s work to abolish state-sanctioned, systemic, structural, and interpersonal forms of violence and oppression. Through this dedication, we acknowledge all those whose survival is resistance, who have succumbed to COVID-19, and whom we have lost to these forms of violence.

Aziz Choudry (professor at the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation, University of Johannesburg) and Mónica Trujillo López (professor of international relations, Universidad Popular Autónoma del Estado de Puebla) were taken from this world too soon. This book is crafted in the spirit of their scholarly activism.

Gülden Özcan—our dear, beloved friend, colleague, and contributor to this volume—was diagnosed with terminal cancer on December 24, 2021. She was admitted into palliative care at the Chinook Regional Hospital on May 5, 2022. This book is also dedicated to her life, her work, and the ongoing resilience of her partner, Ozgur, and her son, Ekim. Her research stands at an analytical distance from the traditional disciplines of sociology, political science, history, law and legal studies, and criminology while equally benefiting from the different literature commonly linked to these disciplines. Her projects involve the contested geographies of what is known as Turkey, the UK, Canada, and the US, and her life was devoted to the kinds of scholarly activism celebrated by this volume.

Gülden’s concerns with the theory of pacification as a war strategy aimed at ordinary citizens and her explorations of the history of primitive accumulation, exploitation, and work speak directly to the life-threatening work of the contributors to this volume and the colleagues to whom it is dedicated. The work of challenging what Ruth Wilson Gilmore (in Golden Gulag) refers to as “the state-sanctioned and/or extra-legal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” kills people. The contemporary neoliberal university—and its perpetuation of systemic and structural forms of violence and discrimination against those who are different—is a deadly instrument of pacification, slow death, and exploitation. We call on our readers to join the resistance. We call on our universities to stop killing our best scholars.