Paradigms of Border Studies and the Metacultural Approach

ABSTRACT

Reflection on the issues of paradigmatic foundations, the ontological, epistemological, and praxeological assumptions of border studies gives scholars an opportunity to identify and to overcome the limits of cognitive capabilities of this field. Contemporary individual-centric paradigm of border studies emerged as a result of the “anthropological turn” of the 20^th century philosophy where the most important role was played by phenomenology, existentialism, post-positivism, and post-structuralism. However, a more profound effect on the content of the individual-centric paradigm was produced by its struggle against the nature-centric paradigm that prevailed in the study of borders before the 1960s. Post-non-classical revolution in science and philosophy, and the internal contradictions of border studies have created preconditions for the emergence of a new polycentric paradigm. The authors of this article offer the scholars and managers of borders to look at the metacultural approach, which is based on the principles of the polycentric paradigm. This approach can help solve an extremely acute problem of exhaustion of the EU integration capacities.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Anton A. Kireev http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0274-4030

Notes

1 Paradigmatic unity of the contemporary border studies pointed out earlier. See e.g.: (van Houtum 2005, 672; Payan et al. 2013, 6).

2 On the “traditionalists” in border studies see e.g. (Newman 2006, 172).

3 Ideas of Deleuze and Mol are directly echoed by the well-known thesis of Balibar: “borders are everywhere” (Balibar 2002)

4 The terms “border studies” and “anthropology of borders” for many of today’s researchers have become essentially synonymous (Wilson and Donnan 2012, 4–8).

5 “Borderlessness”, in context of the modern individual-centrism, should be understood not as a lack of borders at all, but as a lack of stable, “natural”, objective borders.

6 In the individual-centric paradigm the term “multiplicity” (or even “polycentricity”) of borders generally refers to the existence of a multitude of autonomous bordering agents. In contrast, the polycentrism focuses on a multiplicity of objective systems of different types and their boundaries.

7 See e.g.: http://www.exploringgeopolitics.org/category/geopolitical-approaches/neo-classical-geopolitics/

8 For an interesting example of a possible use of Luhmann's theory in study of borders, see: (Jacobs and Van Assche 2014).

9 On the concept of “generalization” see: (Parsons 1971, 26–28) and (Luhmann 1995, chap. 2). Compare with the concept of “superposition” (Bohr 1961).

10 Since the 2000s, the EU institutions have started to use the concept of interculturalism in their policy. Being based on the same individual-centric ontology as multiculturalism, interculturalism emphasizes the need to promote interaction between members of different cultural communities (Wood 2009; Council of Europe 2013).

11 According to the survey, the negative opinions about Roma, Muslims and Jews are expressed by, respectively, 48, 43, and 16% of respondents (an average for 10 EU countries). (Wike, Stokes, and Simmons 2016, 9).

12 It is estimated that in 2012 the EU population was composed of the following groups: Catholics – 48%, Protestants – 12%, Orthodox – 8%, other Christians – 4%, Muslims – 2%, representatives of other religions – 1%, atheists – 7%, and the unbelievers/agnostics – 16% (CIA Factbook 2016). However, the events of recent years have made noticeable changes in composition of the population of Europe. Thus, in 2016, the proportion of immigrants (mostly Muslims) in the 10 largest countries of the EU reached an average of 12.2% (Wike, Stokes, and Simmons 2016, 12).

13 An example of application of the metacultural approach to relations in North-East Asia, see: (Yachin 2016).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Russian Foundation of Basic Research [grant number 17-27-10001].