The Idea of Injustice: Power, Silence, and the Limits of Liberalism

This authored volume rethinks how injustice is understood in political theory. Rather than seeing it as a departure from justice, the book argues that injustice is structural, constitutive, and foundational to modern liberal orders. Drawing on liberal political thought, anti-caste critique, Black radical traditions, feminist philosophy, and decolonial perspectives, it examines key liberal assumptions of neutrality, consensus, abstraction, and institutional design.

Each chapter treats epistemic, historical, affective, and material silences as central to political analysis. Instead of repairing liberalism, the book seeks to unlearn its closures and open space for grounded and plural ways of imagining politics. It treats listening, refusal, testimony, memory, and affect as theoretical contributions in their own right.

It brings together critical genealogy, affect theory, subaltern studies, and epistemic refusal. It engages with thinkers such as B. R. Ambedkar, Audre Lorde, Iris Marion Young, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Leanne Simpson, and places Global South thought in conversation with Western traditions while maintaining difference. Across eight chapters, the book develops a political theory attentive to history, structural harm, and lived experience.

It provides a critique of liberalism’s conceptual limits and offers an alternative approach that emphasizes listening, witnessing, and world-making. It will be of interest to scholars and students in political theory, postcolonial studies, gender studies, and social justice.

Asis Mistry, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Calcutta. His research engages with comparative politics, contemporary political theory, and digital epistemologies. He has published widely on ethnic and nationalist politics, democratic processes, and questions of justice and injustice in Asia. His work has appeared in leading journals such as Asian Survey and Economic and Political Weekly, among others. His most recent monograph is Rethinking Social Science Research: New Methods and Perspectives (Peter Lang, UK).