Re-submission ERC Adv - CORE: Collective Obligations RE-considered: towards an historical geography of duties

The objective of Re-Core is to submit a modified version of the CORE application. The project will do this by focusing its research on the matter of collective obligations (rather than duties as more broadly conceived), by restricting the historical scope of the research (to the post-Cold War era) and by altering the cases chosen from the ‘meta’ cases of welfare, law and citizenship to the more concrete domains of climate change politics, global public health, and humanitarian relief. The aim will be to study how political obligation has come to be framed across each of these three thematic areas in the post-Cold War era specifically. Notions of collective obligation are not merely germane, or endemic, to particular societies. They are made in and through responses to specific socio-economic and political developments, be that the French Revolution or the crisis of the western welfare state more recently (Okin, 1981; Walton, 2013). As societies respond to such challenges, prevailing ideas regarding collective obligation are variously promoted, concealed or reimagined (e.g. Carens, 1986). Over time new vocabularies (such as philanthropy) arise to replace, or to jostle alongside, older political vocabularies (such as redistributive taxation, or even conscription). Across space the duties that are made meaningful in any one context come to matter in relation to events elsewhere. To understand duties in their historical and geographical specificity, therefore, we need to analyse each of the articulations of collective obligations, the socio-cultural context in which the politics of collective obligation is shaped, and the institutional forms that give certain ideas of common duty their particular shape in relation to social concerns. In doing so it becomes possible to map how collective obligations (qua ‘duties’) function as part of wider social understandings about where in political society the obligation to meet ones commitments to others falls.