Community, Citizenship, Democracy

This project, funded by the AHRC and led by Derek Edyvane aims to enhance democratic practice by improving understanding of 'ordinary citizenship': a mode of everyday, 'not-so-good' citizenship that is often overlooked in research, but that has become a salient feature of contemporary political discourse.

In recent years, Iris Marion Young’s notion of structural injustice has become an influential way of framing a variety of global injustices, such as sweatshop labour, climate change and global poverty. So too has her vision of ‘political responsibility’, in which ordinary citizens act to address such injustices despite not being liable for blame for their part in perpetuating them. While the literature on structural injustice is developed and complex, however, it remains not fully clear what political responsibility requires in practice. In this project, Dr James Souter and Dr Joshua Hobbs will aim to advance theorising on political responsibility for structural injustice by engaging ordinary citizens in discussion and debate in order to develop a feasible account of the practical requirements of political responsibility.

The basis of the project is a new article by Dr Hobbs, entitled ‘Between activism and apathy: global structural injustice and ordinary citizens’, which was published in the Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy in 2025. The project will involve collaboration with the community organising group, West Yorkshire Citizens (a local chapter of Citizens UK), and will engage in grounded normative theory, to develop insights on how ordinary citizens may effectively scaffold activism to address global structural injustice without being activists themselves.

This new project undertaken by Eike Rinke examines current debates in democratic theory concerning the conceptual status, and political function, of listening. In a context in which concerns about "voice" has tended to take precedence over listening, it examines how listening (and related concepts such as attunement and receptivity) have been theorised (or not) in different iterations of deliberative and agonistic democratic theory.

Sam Mace's book project, *Carl Schmitt in the Middle East: Unstable Decisionism and the Failure of Political Orders*, interrogates Schmitt's claim of political order and stability arrived at via the decision and the friend-enemy dichotomy. The book questions this argument within the context of the states of Syria and Iran questioning the proclamation of sovereign stability.