Жизнь, смерть и государство. О новых сопряжениях политического и сакрального

Россия в глобальной политике. 2022. Т. 20. № 1 (113). С. 8–34.

Kaspe S. I.

The author postulates that the recently widely discussed alternatives to the
state as a political form and to specific states—empire, terrorist networks,
transnational corporations, and international organizations—shared the
qualities of transboundariness and extraterritoriality, while the state’s
substantive feature had always been territoriality which helped it survive
many conflicts. The first political effect of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is
also global and transnational, is the revitalization of the state and especially
its territorial dimension, that is, its right to establish and strengthen
external and internal borders. Yet another, more important political effect
of the pandemic is that the state has regained its sacred (in the sociological
sense of the word) status and the role of the “salvation operator,” which it
had had primordially and which temporarily receded into the background
due to the widespread perception of the state exclusively as a “service
structure.” The author believes that this return will significantly affect the
course and outcome of another emerging conflict—between the state and
digital platforms that are rapidly acquiring all the features of the sacred, in
Durkheim’s interpretation of the term. The author concludes that it is the
new junctions between the political and the sacred that will determine the
further development of the world and the state.

Keywords: государство, international organizations, империя, международные организации, транснациональные корпорации, non-state actors, негосударственные акторы, empire, the state, цифровые платформы, digital platforms, terrorist networks, transnational corporations, террористические сети