Descent and duality (Q1345009)

Descent theorems, which originated in Grothendieck's work on commutative algebra in algebraic geometry, and which were subsequently generalized to Grothendieck toposes by Joyal and Tierney, hinge upon being able to characterize the class of effective descent morphisms in the category in question. In this lengthy and technically detailed paper the author makes extensive use of the work of \textit{M. Makkai} [Stone duality for first order logic, Adv. Math. 65, 97-170 (1987; Zbl 0649.03050)] in order to describe the effective descent morphisms in the 2-categories of pretoposes and Barr- exact categories. In both cases they turn out to be the so-called conservative morphisms. The author also shows that in these categories the 2-coregular factorizations coincide with the quotient-conservative factorizations.