Books by Karuna Mantena
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Articles & Essays by Karuna Mantena
Truth and Nonviolence in Post-Truth Times, 2025
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On the Subject of Citizenship: Late Colonialism in the World Today , 2023
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Political Imaginaries in Twentieth-Century India, 2023
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Co-authored with Adom Getachew. Critical Times: Interventions in Global Critical Theory, 2021
This essay surveys some recent attempts to decolonize political theory and engage with non-wester... more This essay surveys some recent attempts to decolonize political theory and engage with non-western political thinkers and traditions, especially anticolonialism. Our concern is that these engagements remain too centered on western political thought as the object of critique and analysis. Through the example of Gandhi and Fanon, we argue that anticolonialism, while engaged in a critique of the west, also had a positive or reconstructive theoretical agenda, one that has been taken up in creative ways in postcolonial political thought. Taking cues from the work of Sudipta Kaviraj, Partha Chatterjee, and Mahmood Mamdani, the essay proposes an alternative mode of decolonizing political theory that takes as its central aim the generation of theory from a study of postcolonial politics. It argues for a historically attuned and comparative approach to postcolonial politics that aims to innovate new concepts and reanimate inherited ones. From this perspective, decolonizing political theory is less a recurring critique of Eurocentrism than an effort to shift the terrain of theorizing and thereby reinvigorate the practice of political theory as such.
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NOMOS LXII: Protest and Dissent, 2020
The contemporary literature on nonviolent politics relies upon a sharp distinction between strate... more The contemporary literature on nonviolent politics relies upon a sharp distinction between strategic and principled nonviolence. Gandhi and King are associated with the latter, defined as a strict moral commitment to nonviolence that both scholars and activists view as unnecessary for the successful practice of nonviolent politics. I argue the distinction between strategic and principled nonviolence is misleading. It misunderstands the most distinctive feature of classical nonviolent politics, namely, how Gandhi and King tethered ethical practice—practices of self-discipline or suffering—to political strategy. This chapter reconstructs an alternative account of nonviolent action—nonviolence as disciplined action—and argues that it is also strategic in orientation but premised upon a different theory of politics and political action. Disciplined action is underpinned by a skeptical ontology of action which highlights the affective dynamics of action. I contrast this to the prevailing model of nonviolence as collective power, which focuses on techniques of mass mobilization and the generation of social power. I distinguish the conceptual logic of these competing theories of nonviolent politics and the differing forms of protest and dissent they recommend.
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Ab Imperio, 2018
In the introduction to the forum "Political Imaginaries at the End of Empire," Karuna Mantena and... more In the introduction to the forum "Political Imaginaries at the End of Empire," Karuna Mantena and Rama Sundari Mantena remind readers that the original projects for postimperial society did not necessarily envision the ideal of the nation-state. One of the most prominent alternatives proposed to the nation-state was the idea of federation, which ranged in form and scale from imperial and regional supranational configurations to more pluralistic domestic constitutional arrangements.
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To Shape a New World: The Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by Brandon Terry and Tommie Shelby, 2018
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AEON, 2016
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Popular Sovereignty in Historical Perspective, edited by Richard Bourke and Quentin Skinner, 2016
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Empire and Modern Political Thought, edited by Sankar Muthu, 2012
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American Political Science Review, 2012
Although Gandhi is often taken to be an exemplary moral idealist in politics, this article seeks ... more Although Gandhi is often taken to be an exemplary moral idealist in politics, this article seeks to demonstrate that Gandhian nonviolence is premised on a form of political realism, specifically a contextual, consequentialist, and moral-psychological analysis of a political world understood to be marked by inherent tendencies toward conflict, domination, and violence. By treating nonviolence as the essential analog and correlative response to a realist theory of politics, one can better register the novelty of satyagraha(nonviolent action) as a practical orientation in politics as opposed to a moral proposition, ethical stance, or standard of judgment. The singularity of satyagraha lays in its self-limiting character as a form of political action that seeks to constrain the negative consequences of politics while working toward progressive social and political reform. Gandhian nonviolence thereby points toward a transformational realism that need not begin and end in conservatism, moral equivocation, or pure instrumentalism.
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Modern Intellectual History, 2012
Gandhi’s critique of the modern state was central to his political thinking. It served as a
pivo... more Gandhi’s critique of the modern state was central to his political thinking. It served as a
pivotal hinge between Gandhi’s anticolonialism and his theory of politics and was given
striking institutional form in his vision of decentralized peasant democracy. This essay
explores the origins and implications of Gandhian antistatism by situating it within a
genealogy of early twentieth-century political pluralism, specifically British and Indian
pluralist criticism of state sovereignty and centralization. This essay traces that critique
from the imperial sociology of Henry Sumner Maine, through the political theory of
Harold Laski and G. D. H. Cole, to Radhakamal Mukerjee’s reworking of these strands
into a normative–universal model of Eastern pluralism. The essay concludes with a
consideration of Gandhi’s ideal of a stateless, nonviolent polity as a culmination and
overturning of the pluralist tradition and as integral to his distinctive understanding
of political freedom, rule, and action.
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Ambivalenzen der Ordnung. Der Staat im Denken Hannah Arendts, edited by Julia Schulze Wessel, Christian Volk, and Samuel Salzborn, 2013
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Politics in Dark Times: Encounters with Hannah Arendt, edited by Seyla Benhabib, Roy T. Tsao, and Peter Verovsek, 2010
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A Bicentennial Reassessment, 2007
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Victorian Visions of Global Order: Empire and International Relations in Nineteenth-Century Political Thought, edited by Duncan Bell, 2007
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Law and HistoryCurrent legal Issues 2003 Volume 6, 2004
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Reviews and Review Essays by Karuna Mantena
Law and Political Economy Blog, 2018
Post for a symposium on Samuel Moyn's Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (Harvard, 2018).
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Immanent Frame, 2016
Co-authored with Aziz Rana. On Saba Mahmood’s Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority R... more Co-authored with Aziz Rana. On Saba Mahmood’s Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report (Princeton, 2015)
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Books by Karuna Mantena
Articles & Essays by Karuna Mantena
pivotal hinge between Gandhi’s anticolonialism and his theory of politics and was given
striking institutional form in his vision of decentralized peasant democracy. This essay
explores the origins and implications of Gandhian antistatism by situating it within a
genealogy of early twentieth-century political pluralism, specifically British and Indian
pluralist criticism of state sovereignty and centralization. This essay traces that critique
from the imperial sociology of Henry Sumner Maine, through the political theory of
Harold Laski and G. D. H. Cole, to Radhakamal Mukerjee’s reworking of these strands
into a normative–universal model of Eastern pluralism. The essay concludes with a
consideration of Gandhi’s ideal of a stateless, nonviolent polity as a culmination and
overturning of the pluralist tradition and as integral to his distinctive understanding
of political freedom, rule, and action.
Reviews and Review Essays by Karuna Mantena
pivotal hinge between Gandhi’s anticolonialism and his theory of politics and was given
striking institutional form in his vision of decentralized peasant democracy. This essay
explores the origins and implications of Gandhian antistatism by situating it within a
genealogy of early twentieth-century political pluralism, specifically British and Indian
pluralist criticism of state sovereignty and centralization. This essay traces that critique
from the imperial sociology of Henry Sumner Maine, through the political theory of
Harold Laski and G. D. H. Cole, to Radhakamal Mukerjee’s reworking of these strands
into a normative–universal model of Eastern pluralism. The essay concludes with a
consideration of Gandhi’s ideal of a stateless, nonviolent polity as a culmination and
overturning of the pluralist tradition and as integral to his distinctive understanding
of political freedom, rule, and action.