Generalized action monads and descent

Published in Preprint, 2026

Joint work with Elena Caviglia and Sophie Marques.

We develop a monadic approach to actions of internal categories. Given an internal category, we construct a monad on a slice whose algebras are the actions of that internal category. Then, we give a complete characterization of the monads that arise in this way; we call them generalized action monads. Finally, we prove that these monads yield a well-behaved notion of generalized descent.

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