HEИндивидуална стипендия2023–2025

LE · Legitimate Emergencies: Reconciling Liberal Rights and Democratic Authority in Times of Crisis

„Хоризонт Европа“ — Действия „Мария Склодовска-Кюри“

Период: 2023-09-01 → 2025-08-31
Финансиране от ЕС: 187 624 €
Участници: 1
Схема: HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF

Линиите свързват координатора с партньорите.

Накратко на български

Връзката между демократичните права и властта при кризи, като пандемията от COVID-19 или климатичните промени, е в центъра на анализа. Това помага да се разбере кога ограничаването на свободите е оправдано и как гражданите могат да оценят легитимността на правителството.

Този кратък обзор е генериран от изкуствен интелект

Кратко обяснение, генерирано от езиков модел по текста на CORDIS. Оригиналът е по-долу.

Резултати накратко

Legitimate Emergencies: Reconciling Liberal Rights and Democratic Authority in Times of Crisis

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 and, more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic presented liberal democracies with a profound challenge. In both cases, citizens readily accepted restrictions on fundamental rights – such as freedom of movement and association – in the name of national security or public health. For liberal theorists, these rights are core to a just political order, and their suspension raises difficult questions about the resilience of liberal democracy in moments of crisis. Realist political philosophers have argued that such emergencies reveal a deeper truth: the values that liberals take to be foundational may not be as central in practice as they appear in theory. Liberals, by contrast, respond that restrictions are temporary and instrumental. Radical measures are necessary to protect core values in the long run. Yet with ongoing or “smouldering” crises, such as climate change, the question becomes more urgent: how long and to what extent can a community renege on fundamental rights before its democratic commitments are hollowed out? And how can citizens evaluate whether a government is legitimately curtailing rights, especially when ordinary democratic processes, such as parliamentary oversight or elections, are suspended? Resolving these questions was the central objective of this MSCA project. My aim was to develop a realist theory of political emergencies: one that clarifies what crises reveal about our political values, and how citizens can assess the legitimacy of government authority under exceptional conditions. A secondary objective was to apply this framework to concrete cases – above all the COVID-19 pandemic, but also longer-term crises such as climate change. By integrating insights from political theory, philosophy, and jurisprudence, the project contributes both to academic debates on legitimacy and to the urgent societal need to understand how democracies can remain resilient in times of crisis.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз

Цел на проекта

This project will perform a realist analysis of emergency politics. More specifically, it will give a realist account of what states of emergency reveal about the nature of political legitimacy. This will be achieved through a mixture of history of political theory, critical analysis of competing recent approaches to emergency, and an empirical study of the political crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. At present, political realists controversially argue that emergency politics expose how liberal theories of legitimacy are excessively divorced from reality. Their argument, however, remains underdeveloped in three key respects. In the first place, they seek to ground their claims in a broadly Nietzschean worldview, yet they do so in a manner that conspicuously jars with what Nietzsche himself writes about situations of emergency. Second, the realist literature fails to critically engage with recent liberal theories of emergency (and vice versa). Finally, realists neglect a wealth of relevant literature in jurisprudence, which has not yet been brought to bear on the debate in political theory. By addressing each of these lacunae, this interdisciplinary project will formulate a robust realist theory of emergency, one that will then be empirically applied to the states of emergency declared in response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The results of the project will be published in the form of a monograph.

Оригинален текст от CORDIS (на английски).

Участници

UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM · AmsterdamКоординаторНидерландия