Religion, Politics and Law in a Disintegrating World

Sanaullah Khan is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College, City University of New York. His work explores health inequities, religion, global health, security regimes, and psychological anthropology, with a particular focus on Pakistan and urban United States contexts. He holds a PhD in Anthropology and a Graduate Certificate in Global Health from Johns Hopkins University.

We find ourselves in a world with rising authoritarianism and where the possibility of conflict has also meant the disintegration of global peace, ushered by a period of American decline power and the realities of an increasingly multipolar world, one where the effects of US dominance are still felt acutely, through unilateral acts such as the abduction of Maduro, the ongoing strikes on Iran, as well as renegotiation of trade deals with countries around the world. In all these events, what the US has to continuously reckon with is the projection of power abroad, when inequality within home keeps widening. I have been studying the inequalities in rust belt cities in the US, which suffer from the chronic impacts of de-industrialization, poverty, drug use, policing and rising costs of care, especially with the expansion of the care economy. I understand the current events through American reassertion of dominance amid decline, or the emerging conditions of a multi-polar world, as well through a broader trend toward muscular politics around the world, where weakness in internal politics is overcome through an exertion of force abroad, as the political scientist Jonathan Kirshner has suggested, Kirshner, J. (2025, June 20). The last days of American power. UnHerd.

Not only has the US lost its preeminence, it is just about finished as a great superpower.

When approaching this decline, and the arbitrary ways in which the US has begun to exert itself internationally, it is important to appreciate the long history whereby the US and its allied employed the language of legality, which is still there, but is giving way to the brute force that it previously concealed. Notions of "self-defense" and "preemption" are increasingly used to exert control extra-territorially. The threat of terror has now made is possible for states like India, Pakistan, Israel, United States and Russia to exert control beyond their borders as a way to manage perceived threats— in that the protection of the homeland has become dependent on the maintenance and safety of areas beyond. The use of calculative reasoning means that civilian deaths are now considered necessary losses, even if a few supposed enemies can be eliminated. As Didier Fassin, the anthropologist has argued in his recent book Moral Abdication, notions of self-defense and the language of legality is often accompanied by the otherization of the enemy, in a way that denies the enemy of their humanity. Relatedly, one can think about how countries think about collateral damage estimates, whereby if the target is high value, civilian death somehow becomes acceptable and the necessary costs. Bowman, T. (2023, November 11). The brutal calculus of war: Is the killing of civilians ever justified? WUNC News.

This violence has deep colonial roots, the bombing of Waziristan in Pakistan isn't new; it has persisted since colonial times. British troops used aircraft to bombard Waziri and Mahsud villages and bombard tribal areas to bring the conflict under control. These bombings were part of efforts to suppress resistance and restore colonial authority along the North-West Frontier. American violence is rational and targeted, whereas Iran targets military bases in response to US-Israeli strikes, the pretext, the presence of US bases across the Middle East, is erased in favor of an argument about Iran's senseless violence against its enemy. This, too, has a long history, whereby the violence of countries that have mastered global counterinsurgency doctrines in the aftermath of 9/11 is described as rational and sanitized, versus the barbaric violence of enemies, even if technically even violence that has the recourse of law is intensely barbaric, as Talal Asad reminds us. The only difference being; while the state has a recourse to law, the enemy often doesn’t which is why their violence is barbaric and reckless, whereas the state’s violence is just and moral.

Meanwhile, we are seeing a rise in muscular politics that has recourse to law, but is increasingly relying on religious logics – scriptural and divine violence— that relies heavily on scripture or an eschewed version of divine justice, whether in the references to Amalek, the notion that violence is necessary as a sign of love (with the imagery of Sindoor invoked by the Indian state), or the Augustinian notions of just war that have shaped American counterinsurgency doctrines-- in all these instances, law isn't absent but is operationalized in a very particular way to make violence morally necessary, and this is precisely the reason why the scale of violence in today's world is increasing. Despite the claims to being rational, the violence states are inflicting is also religious sanctioned. The just war tradition, after all, has roots in the Augustinian tradition, and its pacifist tendencies have been downplayed when it is invoked to think about the role of America’s role in global politics.

I'd like to draw the reader's attention to a few events in particular— the recent meeting between Netanyahu and Modi where, whereby sympathizing over the two country's shared tragedy of losing innocent civilians to terror attacks, there was a silent sanctioning of Muslims and Palestinians as sacrificial subjects for the state's peace and stability. When pushed further, the same logic also shapes how the Pakistani state has referred to Afghan refugees, creating an actual equivalence of a single Pakistani life as equal to thousand Afghans, where the stability of national hierarchies within an increasingly authoritarian context, relies upon punishing an outsider, and here, self-defense which is inherently aggressive in nature is made possible through a selective recourse to religion, as in the imagining of Pakistan as a wall of believers (as if it is made from lead) drawing from the Quranic verse (bunyan um marsoos), especially in the country’s recent conflict with India. Religious righteousness increasingly confused with protection of post-colonial hierarchies, forms of surveillance and control.

Further, we also see a rise of civilizational discourses that often help otherize an enemy, and once the enemy is stripped of any legal protection, any form of violence can become justified, and here the imagination of the enemy in territories abroad also taints the way minorities are viewed at home. Beneath these civilizational tropes of the West as in Marco Rubio’s speech, “we will always be a child of Europe,” Pamuk, H., Slattery, G., & Gray, A. (2026, February 14). Rubio casts US, the “child of Europe,” as critical friend to allies. Reuters. we see a simple interest—to keep the global economy, with free trading lanes, and stability of the economy backed by petrodollars intact, but we are also living in times when the illusions of safety and security that states have clung on, slowly slips from the fingers, as local conflicts begin to engulf regions, and countries begin to once again invest heavily in military expenditures, as the only source of security.

And here one must ask the important question about how the rational violence inflicted by the allies, too, is just as senseless, as the violence that it protects people from—the only way to overcome this resurgence, would be by fundamentally changing the vocabulary through which we talk about war and peace— expunging any attempt global violence through forms of necessity, and by recognizing the histories of violence, colonial and post-colonial, that generate the threat of militancy, and then moving to a shared recognition of humanity that exceeds nationalistic borders, where instead of resorting to finding new national myths, it is perhaps time to recognize the fictions on which these are often based.