Intellectual reflection repeatedly returns to a familiar provocation: what relevance does theory retain in an age where functionalist certainties have receded and grand ideologies appear exhausted. Yet such a claim misrecognizes the present. Ours is not a post-theoretical moment but one deeply saturated with the afterlives of poststructuralist and postcolonial thought, even as it witnesses a simultaneous resurgence of older anchors such as religion, memory, and civilizational identity. What has altered is not the disappearance of power, but the transformation of its modalities. Domination persists, though less through overt assertion and more through diffusion, less through rigid structures and more through fluid and shifting alignments.

The twentieth century unfolded through grand narratives and their eventual disillusionments. The present century, by contrast, is marked by uncertainty, the erosion of normative certainties, and the exposure of long-sustained fictions that once appeared self-evident. Yet beneath this instability lies a striking continuity. Power and domination remain the organizing principles of global and social relations. Contemporary regimes of human rights, financial conditionality, and environmental or labour governance present themselves as progressive and universal. However, these frameworks often operate as disciplinary instruments, regulating and incorporating societies into asymmetrical structures of global power, particularly those that remain peripheral or resistant.

The idea of the rule of law, once celebrated as the moral foundation of modernity, thus demands renewed scrutiny. The modern project promised democratic nation-states grounded in freedom, institutional merit, and market rationality, accompanied by welfare and opportunity. Yet this promise was always fractured. The horrors revealed by the Holocaust exposed the violence embedded within societies that claimed moral leadership, while the intellectual exhaustion of functionalism revealed the limits of consensus-based explanations of order.

Even so, much of the postcolonial world continued to inhabit the promise of liberal rights and freedoms. These ideals, however, were never purely........

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