Political Space: Methodological Approaches to the Formation and Development of the Concept

Abstract

The article defines the peculiarities of the methodological basis for studying the concept of "political space". The purpose of the study is to establish whether the development of the scientific and methodological conceptualization of political space corresponds to the dynamics of the process of its global deterritorialization. Achieving this goal involved: analyzing the formation and development of the discourse on the space of political action (which can be territorialized and deterritorialized); determining the relevance of deterritorialization of the political process at the present stage; determining whether the dynamics of the scientific and methodological conceptualization of political space corresponds to the actual political processes of its development. The answers to the set tasks determine the logic of the research and its structure.
It is noted that the national-territorial space of political action, traditional for the Modernity (Westphalian logic of the international order), loses its unambiguous territorial dimension and becomes the result of political management. Strategic documents of the EU and Council of Europe institutions, as well as recommendations and resolutions of socio-political structures, based on the UN Agenda 2030 program, announce reforms of decentralization, spatial deconcentration of resources and functions, and dehierarchization of complex systems. The Postmodern era with its ideas of networking and dehierarchy levels the territorial space as a condition for political interaction, and assumes an active role of a mobile subject constructing a new reality. The academic consequence of transformations is a rethinking of the processes of global reformatting and organization of territorial and political processes. The paper defines the periodization of the development of the methodology for analyzing territorial and political systems, clarifies the relationship between the concepts of "place", "territory", "space", which is determined by the chosen methodology of analysis. It is shown that the conceptualization of the concept of "political space" is associated with the definition of the nature of "space" as an objective, subjective or intersubjective reality, as well as with the definition of the basic methodological basis for the study of space as an objective or constructed in the process of "battle of cognitive maps" reality.