Karuna Mantena

Karuna Mantena specializes in political theory with research interests in the theory and history of empire, South Asian intellectual history, and postcolonial democracy. She holds a B.Sc.(economics) in international relations from the London School of Economics (1995), an M.A. in ideology and discourse analysis from the University of Essex (1996), and a Ph.D. in government from Harvard University (2004). Her first book, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton, 2010), analyzed the transformation of nineteenth-century British imperial ideology. She is finishing a book on M. K. Gandhi and the politics of nonviolence. She is also co-director of the Conference for the Study of Political Thought (https://www.icspt.org). 

Some of Mantena's recent publications include: “Exemplary Citizens and the Symbolic Politics of Nonviolent Protest,” Nonviolence and Truth in Post-Truth Times, edited by Vinay Lal (OUP, forthcoming); “Political Identity and Postcolonial Democracy,” On the Subject of Citizenship: Late Colonialism in the World Today, edited by Suren Pillay (Zed/Bloomsbury, 2023), “Mass Satyagraha and the Problem of Collective Power,” Political Imaginaries: Rethinking India’s Twentieth Century, edited by Manu Goswami and Mrinalini Sinha (Bloomsbury, 2022); “Anticolonialism and the Decolonization of Political Theory,” with Adom Getachew, Critical Times: Interventions in Global Critical Theory 4:3 (2021); “Competing Theories of Nonviolence,” Protest and Dissent: NOMOS LXII, edited by Melissa Schwartzberg (NYU, 2020); “Showdown for Nonviolence: The Theory and Practice of Nonviolence,” To Shape a New World: The Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by Brandon Terry and Tommie Shelby (2018).