My work sits at the intersection of political theory, anticolonial thought, and the ethics of emerging technologies. Across research, teaching, and public engagement, I pursue a central question: what does it mean to justify political and social authority in the wake of empire and in the face of rapidly advancing artificial intelligence? I am interested not simply in critique, but in the possibility of intellectual and ethical reinvention. Drawing from both historical traditions and contemporary crises, I aim to think beyond dominant liberal paradigms of legitimacy and toward more expansive, situated, and dignified understandings of what it means to be human.
My first major research project, Justification After Empire: Anticolonial Ethics, Self-Respect, and the Reinvention of Political Thought, explores how anticolonial thinkers across the twentieth century transformed the normative languages through which political authority is justified. Engaging figures such as M.K. Gandhi, B.R. Ambedkar, and Abul Kalam Azad, I trace how anticolonial thought and action did not merely resist colonial rule but reconfigured core political concepts like progress, reason, and sovereignty from within traditions historically excluded from political theory.
This project argues that anticolonial ethics were not merely reactive or nationalist. Rather, they constituted a profound philosophical intervention into the modern West’s justificatory grammar. Anticolonial ethics exposed the complicity of liberal justifications, such as progress, universal reason, and legal neutrality, with imperial projects of rule. However, more importantly, they offered alternative grounds for political legitimacy rooted in practices of self-respect, ethical action, and civilizational plurality. These transformations are not simply of historical interest but offer resources for confronting contemporary challenges to legitimacy in a global context marked by inequality, technological transformation, and majoritarian democracies.
The formal end of the empire did not resolve the question of legitimacy, it intensified it. The book frames these transformations as constituting a reorientation of justificatory discourse, a shift from procedural legitimacy toward a more relational, embodied, and historically conscious account of enabling self-respect. Anticolonial ethics transformed not only the language of resistance but the architecture of legitimacy itself.
This insight grounds my second research project, which confronts how artificial intelligence systems are reviving and rearticulating modern imperial categories in technical form. I argue that contemporary AI systems are not merely tools of innovation; they are instruments of classification, prediction, and control that encode racial, economic, and epistemic hierarchies into digital infrastructures. These systems often draw on data histories shaped by colonial relations, through global supply chains, labor hierarchies, surveillance regimes, and the extractive economies of platform capitalism. Yet they are often presented through frameworks of liberal proceduralism: fairness, bias mitigation, transparency, and explainability. What I call the procedural alibi of AI ethics deflects attention from structural issues shaped by AI by framing harm as a problem of optimization or error. Building on my background in political theory, I examine how AI ethics frameworks rely on a thin, procedural conception of justice that does not account for the historical and global dimensions of inequality. These frameworks often universalize technical rationality while marginalizing the philosophical and political traditions that have long theorized power, harm, and ethical life outside of Western liberalism.
Rather than abandon AI ethics altogether, I argue for its reconstitution. A decolonial approach to AI ethics would begin not with abstractions about harm or fairness, but with structural questions about history, political economy, and epistemology. It would attend to how AI systems participate in a planetary system of knowledge extraction and resource dispossession. And it would draw on anticolonial, abolitionist, and indigenous traditions that have long theorized the unjust distribution of voice, visibility, and authority. These traditions offer not only critique but resources for reimagining collective worldmaking in an age of planetary computation.
Across all my work, I return to a simple yet difficult question: how is authority justified in a world that is no longer governed by the promises of progress, reason, or development? What comes after the collapse of liberal universals? How do we construct frameworks of legitimacy that are not predicated on exclusion, domination, or epistemic erasure? We are living in a moment when the future of the human is being redefined by climate collapse, algorithmic governance, and the erosion of democratic life. My work seeks to meet this moment not with nostalgia or resignation, but with a commitment to ethical reinvention. I believe that the resources for this reinvention exist in the anticolonial archive, in feminist and indigenous epistemologies, and in the collective practices of care, refusal, and imagination that have always sustained life at the margins of empire.
