Professor Karuna Mantena

IAS Spotlight Series: Pacifism and Nonviolence

Columbia University

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 (2010), analyzed the transformation of nineteenth-century British imperial ideology. She is currently finishing a book on M. K. Gandhi and the politics of nonviolence. She is also co-director of the International Conference for the Study of Political Thought.

Some of Mantena's recent publications include: “Anticolonialism and the Decolonization of Political Theory,” Critical Times: Interventions in Global Critical Theory (2021) [Co-authored with Adom Getachew]; “Competing Theories of Nonviolence,” Protest and Dissent: NOMOS LXII, edited by M. Schwartzberg, NYU Press (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 B. Terry and T. Shelby (2018); “The Power of Nonviolence,” AEON (2016).