Book Project I

Justification After Empire: Constitutionalism, Knowledge, and the Ethics of Power examines how modern societies justify political authority and legitimacy in the wake of empire. The book explores the relationship between constitutionalism, knowledge, and power, asking how the moral and institutional legacies of empire continue to shape democratic life and international order. At its core, it treats constitutionalism as a site of knowledge and ethical reconstruction. Rather than viewing the constitution as a purely legal instrument, it approaches it as an epistemic and normative framework. Through this lens, the book connects the grammars of anticolonial thought to the institutional challenges of plural democracies, where competing claims to intelligibility, progress, and self-respect are continuously negotiated.

The project begins from a central question: what does it mean to justify political authority after empire? Imperial rule claimed moral universality and administrative reason; its collapse left a profound gap in the foundations of legitimacy. Justification After Empire traces how that gap was addressed through anticolonial knowledge formation, constitutional design, and the infrastructures of governance. It argues that the moral claims of modern democracy after empire are inseparable from the infrastructures that sustain them: legal frameworks, institutions of knowledge, and digital architectures that organize visibility and recognition.

The argument unfolds through three interconnected dimensions. It first reframes constitutionalism as a justificatory practice rather than a static legal form, showing how constitutions become living sites where societies negotiate the terms of inclusion, recognition, and stability. It then examines knowledge as an infrastructure of power, exploring how social science, law, and technology render subjects intelligible to authority. Finally, it situates these discussions within an ethics of power, asking how justification can be sustained under conditions of hierarchy and pluralism, and how institutions translate ideals of dignity and equality into durable forms of political life.

Methodologically, the book weaves political theory, legal analysis, and the history of knowledge to show how justification operates as both a conceptual and institutional process. The early chapters examine how anticolonial thinkers such as Ambedkar, Azad, and Nehru grappled with the collapse of imperial authority and sought to reconstruct legitimacy through ethics and law. Later chapters trace how these justificatory forms were reinterpreted in moments of democratic crisis through majoritarian politics, constitutional reinterpretation, and the expansion of digital governance. The concluding chapter extends the analysis to the algorithmic age, arguing that computational infrastructures have become the newest architecture of justification, redefining what counts as knowledge and how political subjects become legible to the state and to international institutions. In this context, the book introduces the Knowledge of Structures Problem, a framework for analyzing how algorithmic systems reproduce earlier patterns of authority and recognition.

Across these domains, Justification After Empire advances a broader argument: that the endurance of democracy depends not only on institutional design but on the ethical and epistemic conditions that make justification possible. By linking constitutionalism, knowledge, and the ethics of power, the book offers both a historical interpretation and a normative vision of how legitimacy can be rebuilt in an unequal and interdependent world.