How to write an affirmative book without resorting to the affirmation of another abstraction – a people, a nation, a state … a university? How to make an affirmation with a negation and a reversal at its heart? Read Praem Hidam's Non-Venatus: On the Production of Wars and Universities to find these questions not answered but addressed in such unforeseen and crystalline ways that the meaning of terms such as 'non' and 'counter' relinquish being merely logical operations and instead become real movements of thought. So, the 'non' in non-venatus is not simply the other of the figure of the 'hunt', the hunt of concepts to capture objects and the hunt of objects to exhaust worlds – rather, the 'non-hunt' and 'noncapture' are movements of thinking in minute and world-historical ways, which disassemble and reassemble extant conceptual machines. That is to say, extant machines of wars and universities are seen as much in their production as in their precarity: wars are not military and localized in the first place, just as universities are not universal and conceptual as a matter of institutional good faith. Indeed, the non-capture and the non-hunt are also strange abstractions in the sense of being 'counter-abstractions' composed with deep alliances and a little malice (why not!). As a set of summary allusions – though the book laughs robustly at the citation industry (the little malice…) – I think of Gilles Deleuze's statement that a universal explains nothing, every universal needs to be explained; and Michel Foucault's motto that institutions must be subjected to analyses both more capillary and of greater generality than the institutional level itself, as I turn to the next scintillating page of Hidam's book.

Soumyabrata Choudhury, the author of Ambedkar and Other Immortals: An Untouchable Research Programme, and Professor at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU

In Non-Venatus, Praem Hidam investigates different modes of escape from predatory relationships. The book's originality lies in its insistence that stateless fugitives require a liberating culture and a new form of education – one capable of reinventing an imaginative, multiple and wandering communal life through a speculative, imaginative history independent of official narratives. Hidam identifies three techniques of liberation: speculative history, talestrial practice and the disestablishment of war. Adopting a revolutionary perspective, the author recalls Antonio Negri's argument that questions of identity for stateless people are only a beginning; what truly enables the construction of a sovereign people – as a 'multitude' or community – is the self-abolition of fixed identity.

Mehrdad Vahabi, the author of Political Economy of Predation: Manhunting and the Economics of Escape, and Professor of Economics, University of Sorbonne Nord

Venatus: the hunt. Capture, appropriation, control. In the extreme, war. Hidam Premananda investigates the role of abstraction in the production and maintenance of formations of power on the prowl. Non-Venatus: escape. Every exercise of power opens an avenue for it. Counter-abstraction. Figures of creative escape proliferate through the book, mounting a conceptual counter-war machine. Non-Venatus: On the Production of Wars and Universities develops an original analysis of domination and its undoing, for a 'peace nomadology'.

Brian Massumi, the author of Personality of Power: A Theory of Fascism for Anti-fascist Life, and Professor at the Department of Communication, Université de Montréal

Praem Hidam's Non-Venatus is a theoretical tour de force that critiques the predatory nature of Knowledge-driven systems and how these systems work through orders of abstraction and models of pedagogy that undermine, marginalize or exclude concrete experiential engagements with the world. It examines the Nexus between power, discursive formations, epistemologies and institutional practices pertaining to education in societies that subject their populations to technological control and data-driven agendas under the guise of secular emancipatory ideals that promote false narratives of choice.

Saikat Ghosh, co-editor of Horror Fiction in the Global South, and Associate Professor, Department of English, SGTB Khalsa College, University of Delhi