Book Project I

Justification After Empire: Anticolonial Ethics and the Politics of Constitutionalism is a study of how the moral and institutional legacies of empire continue to shape constitutional democracy and international politics in our time. It is a book about political authority, democratic resilience, and the global challenges of legitimacy. By situating the problem of justification at the center of constitutional and international life, it argues that many of today’s crises cannot be understood without grappling with how the justificatory logics of empire were dismantled, contested, and reconstituted in the aftermath of decolonization.

The project begins from a simple but often overlooked question: what does it mean to justify political authority after empire? Imperial rule claimed moral universality, rational administration, and the inevitability of its own institutions. Its collapse left a profound gap in the foundations of legitimacy. In South Asia, and particularly in India, this gap became the site of intense debate. Constitutionalism emerged as the primary language of political legitimacy, but it was always contested by rival claims about sovereignty, pluralism, and belonging. Rather than telling a story of straightforward progress, Justification After Empire examines how these disputes over law, identity, and recognition continue to shape the foundations of political life far beyond South Asia, resonating in global debates about democracy, populism, and the ethics of emerging technologies.

The book makes three broad interventions. First, it reframes constitutionalism as a justificatory practice, not merely a legal or institutional form. Constitutions are not simply texts or rules; they are living sites where societies negotiate claims to recognition, dignity, and justice. This lens allows us to see how constitutional frameworks can empower marginalized groups while also constraining their demands, how they can provide stability while being vulnerable to capture by majoritarian politics. Second, it examines majoritarianism not only as a political phenomenon but as a justificatory structure: a way of closing off pluralism by defining who counts as the authentic bearer of the nation. Third, it extends these concerns into the terrain of international relations and technological change, showing how algorithmic governance and digital infrastructures reproduce classificatory logics with deep roots in the imperial past.

Across six chapters, the book develops a trajectory that moves from the ethical and conceptual to the institutional and global. The opening chapters explore the conditions of intelligibility, progress, and self-respect that anticolonial thought foregrounded as essential to political life after empire. These ethical categories are not treated as abstract ideals but as tools to diagnose the fractures of democracy: the ways in which certain subjects are excluded from recognition, certain futures are foreclosed, and certain forms of dignity are denied. Later chapters examine how these conditions unfold in law and politics. They show how constitutionalism, while promising plural inclusion, can be vulnerable to narrow reinterpretation and how majoritarianism constructs closure by retooling public institutions to reflect a singular cultural identity. The final chapter turns to algorithmic rule, where digital infrastructures, from biometric identification systems to automated welfare platforms, reshape how people become legible to the state and to international institutions. Here, the book introduces the “Knowledge of Structures Problem,” a framework for understanding how algorithmic systems not only mediate knowledge but predetermine the categories through which subjects are governed and valued.

In focusing on these dynamics, Justification After Empire situates South Asia as a critical site for rethinking questions of public law and international legitimacy. India’s constitutional history, its struggles with pluralism, and its rapid digital transformation offer insights with global resonance. Majoritarian politics in India illuminate broader patterns of ethnonationalism worldwide. The fragility of its constitutional institutions speaks to global anxieties about democratic backsliding and constitutional decay. Its digital experiments demonstrate how emerging technologies, often celebrated as neutral tools of governance, can reproduce exclusions and foreclose plural reasoning. By grounding these crises in the debates sparked by empire’s collapse, the book connects local struggles to the global reconstitution of political modernity.

Methodologically, the project weaves together political theory, legal analysis, and international relations. It draws on constitutional debates, legal controversies, political movements, and technological experiments to illustrate how justification operates as a dynamic practice of worldmaking. Justification, in this account, is not a procedural ideal or a retrospective defense of decisions already made. It is prospective, constructive, and ethical. It is the labor of building institutions and concepts that enable people to appear as intelligible, to act with dignity, and to claim worth. When justification fails—when it collapses into closure, exclusion, or automated categorization—democracy itself becomes fragile.

The stakes of this project are therefore both historical and contemporary. Historically, it recovers how societies emerging from empire wrestled with the problem of legitimacy. Contemporary relevance lies in how those legacies shape our present crises. Why do plural democracies so often fracture along lines of identity? Why do constitutional frameworks, built on promises of inclusion, remain so vulnerable to capture? Why do digital systems, designed for efficiency, end up reproducing old hierarchies in new forms? By reframing these as questions of justification, the book opens up a space for normative and institutional renewal.

At its heart, Justification After Empire is about the future of democracy in a fractured and interdependent world. It argues that sustaining democratic life requires more than procedures, more than economic growth, and more than legal form. It requires ongoing ethical labor: the work of building justificatory frameworks that resist closure, sustain pluralism, and nurture self-respect. This is not simply a challenge for South Asia. It is a global challenge for constitutional orders, for international institutions, and for societies grappling with the dual legacies of empire and technology. By drawing these threads together, the book seeks to provide both a historical diagnosis and a normative vision of what it means to justify political life after empire.