CO-DUTIES: Democratic Duties, Collective Action, and the Greater Good after COVID-19

Led by Simon Reid-Henry
Jul 2021 - Jun 2024

​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?


Publications

Peer-reviewed Journal Article

Sandvik, Kristin Bergtora (2021) Refugees and the Scope for Mandatory COVID-19 Vaccination, Cornell International Law Journal 54: 16–20.

Popular Article

Sandvik, Kristin Bergtora; Hans Petter Graver & Peter Scharff Smith (2021) The Pomp of Popular Constitutional Outrage: The democratic struggle over the Norwegian Covid-19 curfew proposal, Verfassungsblog, 2 March.

PRIO Paper

Reid-Henry, Simon; Sinead Dwyer; Christoph Benn & Ida Rødningen (2023) Country Contributions to Global Public Goods for Health, PRIO Paper. Oslo: PRIO.

Report - External Series

Reid-Henry, Simon; Valsamis Mitsilegas; Sophie Harman; Mario Slugan; David McCoy; Sydney Calkin; Aoife Monks; Gülnur Muradoglu; & Stella Ladi (2022) How to Trust in a Pandemic: Report of the Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IHSS) Working Group on COVID-19, IHSS Working Group on Covid-19, Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences. Queen Mary University of London.