Research

My work spans political theory, international relations, and public law, with a particular focus on anticolonial thought, constitutionalism, and the ethics of emerging technologies. At its core, my research asks how political and epistemic authority is justified in a world shaped by the afterlives of modern empires and the monopolistic infrastructures of algorithmic governance. I treat justification not only as critique but as a site of ethical and intellectual reinvention, where traditions outside the Euro-American canon expose the fragility of inherited categories and offer resources for reconstructing legitimacy.

I argue that modern empires reshaped the problem of justification. By binding claims of intelligibility, progress, and dignity to monopolistic infrastructures of world-making, such as trade routes, classifications, and institutions, modern empires left behind a structural condition in which legitimacy remains tethered to monopoly power. After empire, anticolonial thinkers contested these justificatory idioms, showing how universality and progress collapse into domination unless reconstituted through pluralism and self-respect. Today, this same condition resurfaces in AI: its infrastructures of compute, supply chains, and data are necessarily monopolistic, and they are justified through the familiar discourses of universality, inevitability, and innovation.

My first book project, Justification After Empire: Anticolonial Ethics and the Politics of Constitutionalism (forthcoming), examines how competing anticolonial frameworks of intelligibility, progress, and self-respect reconstitute the grounds of legitimacy in the transition from empire to postcolonial democracies, with a focus on South Asia. It traces how pluralist approaches, grounded in constitutional morality and ethical reasoning, can be co‑opted, while monopolistic projects of dominant groups such as Hindu nationalism consolidate exclusion by appropriating the language of dignity. The book argues that justification after empire is not resolved by decolonization but remains tied to monopolistic worldmaking. 

In this book, I develop the argument across several parts. The first traces how anticolonial thinkers recast constitutionalism through concepts of intelligibility, progress, and self-respect. The second examines how these visions confront and are appropriated by majoritarian projects, highlighting the contested nature of constitutional morality. A third part considers how international debates about sovereignty and obligation intersect with these disputes, situating South Asian thought within global constitutionalism. Finally, I gesture to how technological and AI dimensions resonate with these debates, setting the stage for my second project. 

The book emphasizes constitutionalism and majoritarianism as the central focus, while treating AI as a resonance rather than a full domain of inquiry. This analysis speaks directly to debates in public law about the limits of liberal constitutionalism. It also resonates with international relations, because the same logic that allows constitutional morality to be co‑opted by dominant groups also shapes technological transformations. In both cases, authority is monopolized as power concentrates in infrastructures that absorb or destabilize ethical visions. By connecting these domains, the book shows how both constitutional and technological orders can be captured by monopolistic worldmaking, while positioning anticolonial ethics as a resource for rethinking justification in contemporary politics.

My second book project, The Knowledge of Structures Problem, extends these questions into the terrain of algorithmic governance systematically. It develops what I call the Knowledge of Structures Problem, a framework for understanding how AI systems reshape the conditions under which human beings appear as intelligible agents. AI infrastructures inherit colonial grammars of classification, replicating a form of cognition in which categories precede experience and mediate recognition. Just as colonial rule demanded that the colonized cognize themselves through imposed epistemic norms, AI systems recode such norms into computational architectures.

The project argues that the ethical risk is embedded in AI infrastructures, which extend monopolistic worldmaking by justifying their authority through familiar idioms of universality, progress, and inevitability. Postcolonial questions of intelligibility, dignity, and authority thus reemerge in the algorithmic present. Anticolonial critiques of justification offer vital resources for reconstructing legitimacy under conditions where technological change amplifies monopoly power.

Across both projects, I return to a set of enduring questions: How is authority justified when inherited categories have collapsed? What comes after the failure of liberal universals? How do we build ethical and political frameworks that resist domination, exclusion, and epistemic erasure? We are living in a moment when the grounds of the human are being reconfigured by planetary computation, climate crisis, and the erosion of democratic institutions. My work seeks to meet this moment not with despair but with a commitment to ethical reinvention, grounded in histories of anticolonial struggle and practices of collective worldmaking.