How to better understand the relationship between individual duties and collective action in response to large-scale societal challenges.
Congratulations to Simon Reid-Henry and his team for funding from the Research Council of Norway for the three-year project CO-DUTIES: Democratic Duties, Collective Action, and the Greater Good after COVID-19. In addition to Simon, the project will include PRIO researchers Maria G. Jumbert, Kristiffor Lidén and Kristin B. Sandvik, as well as researchers at the Univeristy of Oslo, Queen Mary University of London and University of London Institute in Paris. The project plans to start up in July 2021.
CO-DUTIES aims to provide novel insights into the performance of individual duties in order to better understand how voluntary engagement in democratic societies may address large-scale collective action problems.
To achieve this primary objective the project poses three basic research questions, addressing its historical, political and normative aspects in turn.
- How has the treatment of rights and duties in political and legal discourse changed in the post-1945 period such that imperfect duties of virtue, in particular, have lost their political status?
- How were each of (vertical) civic duties, (horizontal) humanitarian duties, and (mixed) associative duties, understood, framed, and enacted during and after the Coronavirus lockdowns in three liberal democracies: Norway, France and the UK?
- How can empirical understanding of this resurgence of duties inform a theoretical account of the prospects for collective action in response to “greater good” causes?
More information about this project will follow.
