Can ‘Non-territorial Autonomy’ Serve as an Analytical Term? Between ‘Thick’ and ‘Thin’ Approaches
Non-territorial autonomy (NTA) has acquired a variety of meanings ranging from a vague principle (a ‘thin’ approach) to a distinct structural feature of an organization (a ‘thick’ approach). Almost all these interpretations rest on an uncritical reification of such notions as ‘group’ and ‘community’. It leads to an uncritical categorization as NTA of numerous different arrangements and practices, that duplicates the existing terminology and brings no added value to the study of these phenomena. Attempts to outline institutional settings for communal self-organization based on the same premises involve negligence of potential scenarios and outcomes. The author concludes that the interpretations of NTA based on groupist assumptions significantly limit analytic perspectives. Interpretations resting on a non-groupist approach can serve analytical purposes, but their application is optional and barely instrumental. Beyond this, NTA shall be regarded and studied as a category of practice and a matrix for framing diversity issues among policy-makers.