Book Project I
My first book project, Justification After Empire: Anticolonial Ethics, Self-Respect, and the Reinvention of Political Thought, explores how political communities justify democratic self-rule, the authority of law, and the legitimacy of government after the end of empire. It examines how justificatory discourse, the language through which political legitimacy is identified, contested, and justified, has been reshaped by anticolonial ethics.
The book argues that anticolonial thought produced a new way of cognizing the world and reconstructing political life. Rather than merely critiquing imperial modes of classification and cognition, anticolonial thinkers developed alternative frameworks for making worlds, shaping relational and institutional life, and structuring social and political domains in ways that are intelligible. These frameworks reoriented the very grounds of justification, expanding what is intelligible, what counts as political progress, how we make claims to self-rule, and how political thought conceptualizes legitimacy outside colonial paradigms.
Grounded in a close reading of how South Asian worldviews were reconstructed by anticolonial thinkers, the book highlights why self-respect emerged as a central ethical value in their political visions. Anticolonial conceptions of self-respect challenged racism, casteism, and majoritarianism. They demanded recognition of diverse human excellences and collective identities, and they made political life accountable to experiences of dignity and humiliation.
In this way, anticolonial ethics have made self-respect more than a personal or moral aspiration. For postcolonial democracies, shaped by anticolonial thought, self-respect has become a political principle that redefines justification itself. Anticolonial ethics have turned justification into an evolving, collective political ethic through which citizens contest hierarchy, disobey civilly, reshape institutions, and reconstruct pluralist democracy.
By tracing the anticolonial reinvention of justificatory discourse, Justification After Empire offers a new framework for understanding contemporary struggles over legitimacy. It applies this framework to three pressing political arenas: (1) public protest and social movements around immigration, citizenship, and the rise of majoritarianism, focusing on how anticolonial ethics provides frameworks for resisting exclusion and reclaiming political voice in increasingly authoritarian settings; (2) constitutional reinterpretation in liberal democracies, where anticolonial thought challenges the erosion of pluralist norms and offers alternative sources of legitimacy amidst populist upheaval; and (3) the governance of human–AI relationships, where the book argues for rethinking AI ethics through the lens of anticolonial thought to confront the epistemic violence and classificatory hierarchies embedded in global AI infrastructures.
These arenas often render non-Western and anticolonial traditions of political reason unintelligible by recasting ethical debate within narrow procedural frames. In contrast, the anticolonial rethinking of justification offers a radically different approach: one that foregrounds the political and epistemic consequences of historical power, the plural grounds of moral reasoning, and the centrality of interpretive agency to democratic life. It offers a vision of political thought in which the demand for intelligibility is inseparable from the struggle for dignity.