bell hooks’s Black Feminist theory and praxis radically redefine understandings and experiences of ‘power’ across academia and in daily life. As relevant today as ever, hooks’ work holds the emancipatory tools and revolutionary potential to end the violence – epistemic, structural, and physical – that still permeates human relations 40 years on from the book’s first edition. This review essay of hooks’s Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center explores these dynamics and their pertinence for studies of political violence and civil war.