Research

My research examines how political and epistemic authority are justified in contexts shaped by both the historical legacies of empire and the contemporary rise of computational governance. Drawing on political thought, intellectual history, and the study of science and technology, I investigate how ideas such as intelligibility, progress, and self-respect are translated into the institutional languages of law, development, and data. My work approaches justification as a central question of modern politics: how societies explain, legitimate, and reform the forms of authority that organize collective life.

I argue that the modern problem of legitimacy emerged through the close relationship between moral ideals and the infrastructures that sustain them. Modern empires transformed justification into an epistemic enterprise, binding claims of universality and order to administrative, legal, and technological systems. These systems, whether in the form of colonial legal codes, commercial networks, or classificatory knowledge, did not simply regulate political life; they shaped the conditions of intelligibility on which authority depends. The legacy of this historical intertwining is a world in which legitimacy remains mediated by infrastructures of knowledge and governance, even as those infrastructures evolve.

My first book, Justification After Empire: Constitutionalism, Knowledge, and the Infrastructures of Progress (forthcoming), develops a conceptual framework for understanding how legitimacy is reconstructed in post-imperial and pluralist contexts. The book interprets constitutionalism as an epistemic and ethical project. Focusing on constitutionalism in South Asia, which has grappled with the transition from imperial to democratic rule, it traces how ideals of intelligibility, progress, and self-respect shaped debates about popular understandings of constitutionalism, nationalism, and public infrastructure. The argument shows why constitutional democracy can be understood as an ongoing process of justification, in which moral, institutional, and epistemic claims are continually renegotiated.

My second project, The Knowledge of Structures Problem, extends these questions into the study of digital governance and artificial intelligence. It explores how computational systems reframe the problem of legitimacy by redefining what counts as knowledge, how spaces of studying knowledge or data are created, and who can be recognized as a subject of governance. I argue that these technologies present a constitutional challenge of their own: they shift the grounds of justification from public reasoning to technical systems of classification and prediction.

Across these projects, my work aims to clarify how authority, recognition, and legitimacy are maintained and contested in changing historical and technological conditions. By linking traditions of political and constitutional thought to the analysis of modern infrastructures, I seek to contribute to a more realistic understanding of how ethical and epistemic ideals are translated into institutional practice.