Shaunna’s first book project, Justification After Empire: Anticolonial Ethics, Self-Respect, and the Reinvention of Political Thought, examines how political communities justify democratic self-rule, the authority of the law, and the legitimacy of their governments after empire. In it, she interrogates how justificatory discourse—the language through which democracy, legal authority, and political legitimacy is articulated, justified, and contested—has been transformed by anticolonial ethics. She argues that anticolonial ethics has transformed justificatory discourse by exposing how established views that reinforce categories shaped by modern empires, like race, religion, and sexuality, and pre-colonial modes of categorization, like caste, religious orthodoxy, and patriarchy, structure misleading universal criteria of modern political thought.
By critically challenging imperial and precolonial hierarchies, anticolonial ethics reinvented political thought by proposing broader criteria for the following: how to categorize and therefore structure social and political life, how to reason, what it means to be equal to other humans and think universally for all humans, how to gain self-respect, what counts as knowledge and public reason, and how to incorporate diverse modes of justification into the legitimation or refusal of political and legal principles and authority. One of the major claims of this book is that anticolonial ethics are relevant not simply because they opposed imperial rule but because they restructured the grounds of justificatory discourse across the world.
Grounding its analysis in the anticolonial reconstruction of Liberalism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam, this book examines how self-respect emerged as a major justification across their reconstruction for challenging hierarchical imperial and pre-colonial social and political ideas. Self-respect conceptualized by anticolonial ethics has generated a political refusal of social humiliation due to racist, casteist, and majoritarian logics, demanded greater recognition of diverse excellences and their capacity to shape associational life in the public domain, and enabled a cumulative learning of the historical processes that enabled or limited self-respect at the local, national, and global levels. In doing so, it has been an exemplary force in making justification in contemporary democracies not merely a matter of securing institutional stability or legitimating state power but an evolving language through which citizens contest hierarchy, reframe moral and political obligations, and reimagine democratic life.
By tracing the anticolonial reinvention of justificatory discourse, this book lays the groundwork for understanding contemporary transformations in the ethical and epistemic bases of justificatory discourse. It applies this groundwork to three major questions of our time: public protests and social movements related to immigration and citizenship, popular reinterpretations of constitutionalism across liberal democracies, and the governance of human-AI relationships.
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