A consortium of six universities including CEU has been awarded funding of nearly two and a half million Euros under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 framework (Call H2020-SC6-REV-INEQUAL-2016-2017 Reversing Inequalities and Promoting Fairness) for a three year multi-disciplinary research project entitled ETHOS – Towards the European Theory Of Justice and Fairness.
The consortium is led by the University of Utrecht, and the Center for European Union Research will act as the coordinating unit for CEU. Participating CEU faculty members Marie-Pierre Granger (SPP, International Relations, and Legal Studies) and Simon Rippon (Philosophy and SPP), supported by post-doctoral researchers, will lead work packages addressing the legal and philosophical dimensions of the project, act as member of the project’s Executive Board, and contribute to empirical studies. The project will run from the beginning of 2017 to the end of 2019.
ETHOS will investigate the normative underpinnings and practical realisation in Europe of four domains of justice: social, economic, political, and civil and symbolic. To achieve this, the project will explore: (a) philosophical and political tradition, (b) legal frameworks, (c) daily (bureaucratic) practices, (d) current public debates, and (e) accounts of vulnerable populations in six European countries (the Netherlands, the UK, Hungary, Austria, Portugal and Turkey).
The ETHOS project seeks to provide building blocks for the development of an empirically informed European theory of justice by: refining and deepening knowledge of historical and contemporary European foundations of justice; enhancing awareness of mechanisms that impede the realisation of justice in contemporary Europe; advancing our understanding of the process of drawing and re-drawing of the boundaries of justice (fault lines); and providing guidance to politicians, policy makers, advocates and other stakeholders on how to design and implement policies to reverse inequalities and prevent injustice.