What lies at the heart of my diverse and pluralist body of work is a sustained engagement with the problematic of modernity, understood as a racial-capitalist project of Euro-American 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, Africana philosophies, 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.
Work in Progress
Under Review: “Wor(l)ds at War: Genocide and the Colonial Order of Things”
In Progress: “Law and the Order of Things: The Onto-Epistemology of Foucault’s Nomos“
Monograph: Imperial Nomos
Building on themes 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, traces the historical transformation of nomos—a Greco-Roman concept that originally denoted distribution and later came to signify law—to illuminate law’s role not merely as a system of rules but as a “world-making” practice. By revisiting the revival legal thought in the early medieval period, the monograph identifies what I call an “anomic logic of difference” at the heart of the Western legal and political order, from jus publicum Europeaum to the contemporary rules-based liberal order.
This anomic logic constitutes difference not as relational, dynamic, or historically contingent, but as an ontological deficiency requiring management, exclusion, or domination. I argue that this logic has served as a central mechanism through which coloniality has been organized and reproduced as a durable matrix of power, knowledge, and spatial organization. By uncovering the imperial foundations of modern legality, Imperial Nomos offers a counter-genealogy of modernity that reveals law as both a product and producer of imperial world-ordering—one whose enduring structures continue to shape the intersecting political, ecological, and social crises of the present.
Dr. Sabeen Ahmed 