As a political sociologist, I have trained myself to maintain analytical distance from my subjects, to study everyday events and political phenomena with the detachment required for rigorous scholarship. My work revolves around analyzing, researching, and explaining the processes, historical influences, and unfolding of global socio-political events. But the recent release of the Jeffrey Epstein files has shattered that professional remove. I find myself not just analyzing, but reckoning with what these documents reveal about the architecture of power in our contemporary world order.

This is not to say I was naïve about horrendous crimes against humanity, my research in post-colonial studies and Middle Eastern politics has exposed me to systematic violence in various forms. But the Epstein case crystallizes something profound about how global politics, power structures, knowledge production, institutional violence, and hegemonic practices operate within the framework of modern nation-states, unchecked capitalist networks, and state-sponsored operations masked as national security.

Jeffrey Epstein was not just a global financier. He was not merely someone with contacts among the world’s most powerful and wealthy. He was an operative functioning within the institutional apparatus of one of the world’s most powerful countries, a nation that positions itself as the guardian of democracy, the foundation of progressive liberal values, the beacon of Western civilization.

Here lies my central argument: Jeffrey Epstein is not a singular case. He is a plural phenomenon. He represents everything problematic with the socio-political, economic, and moral contradictions of the liberal world order we inhabit today.

Epstein’s network spanned politicians, the intellectual community, celebrities, tech leaders, scientists, and royalty. His crimes were documented. His communications were traceable. He operated openly among the most powerful echelons of global society. Yet the system did not intervene, because the system was implicated.

Jeffrey Epstein is not a singular case. He is a plural phenomenon.

What disturbs me most about the current moment, Epstein’s death under suspicious circumstances in federal custody, Ghislaine Maxwell’s conviction and imprisonment, the gradual court-ordered release of documents, is that it functions as theater. None of this was happening in darkness. This operated in broad daylight. Systems were aware. Institutions knew. People in power were not just aware, they were participants.

Yet it took decades for exposure, and only after investigative journalist Julie K. Brown’s 2018 Miami Herald series forced the issue. Even then, Epstein’s 2008 plea deal, negotiated by then-U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta, gave him just 13 months in a private wing of a county jail for crimes that should have meant life imprisonment. We still don’t know the full circumstances of his death. We don’t know the complete nature of the information in these files being released to us at a controlled pace, in measured........

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