What lies at the heart of my diverse and pluralist body of work is a sustained engagement with the problematic of modernity, understood fundamentally as a racial-capitalist project of Eurocentered (and, increasingly, U.S.-centered) hegemony. Grounded in an interdisciplinary approach informed by critical genealogical methodologies, my work interrogates the colonial foundations of modern political rationalities, including and especially those embedded within Western political thought itself. I trace the historical trajectories and transformations of key political discourses by engaging with the history of philosophy, post- and decolonial studies, gender and feminist theory, Indigenous studies, Critical Theory, and Continental philosophy. By bridging these fields, my scholarship challenges dominant frameworks that have normalized and obscured the emergent forms of fascism shaping our present, while opening space for renewed imaginaries of emancipatory political thought and praxis.
Forthcoming Work & Work in Progress
Forthcoming: “Unmasking the Coloniality of Whiteness: Law and Mexican American Racialization,” co-authored with Sergio Armando Gallegos-Ordorica, in Philosophizing Contestations: Refusal, Disobedience, Resistance, Decolonization, ed. Adam Burgos (Bloomsbury, 2026)
Forthcoming: “Foucault and the Ambivalences of Race,” in The Foucauldian Mind, ed. Daniele Lorenzini (Routledge, 2026)
In Progress: “Worlds at War: Nomos and the Imperatives of Settler Futurity”
In Progress: “Law and the Order of Things: Nomos as (Legal) Ontology”
Monograph: Imperial Nomos
Building on insights developed across my previous work, my current research reconsiders the foundations of legal modernity through the lens of empire. My monograph, Imperial Nomos: A Counter-Genealogy of Modernity, theorizes nomos—a Greco-Roman term that originally meant “distribution” and later came to signify “law”—as a critical concept for understanding law not merely as a system of rules, but as a world-making technology that sustains coloniality as a persistent matrix of power, knowledge, and spatial organization. In tracing this legacy, my work reveals modern law as both a product and producer of imperial world-ordering whose enduring logics underwrite the polycrisis of our contemporary moment.
Dr. Sabeen Ahmed 