THE CONCEPT OF TURBULENCE IN POLITICAL SCIENCE

Abstract

The article presents an attempt to generalize the way of terminological conceptualization of the problem of crisis instability of social development in political science. An attempt is made to compare the concepts of “crisis” – “risk” – “chaos” – “turbulence”. It is established that the initial use of the concept of “turbulence” in the social sciences had a vivid metaphorical character, which remains elsewhere to this day. However, now there is obviously a need to move away from the metaphorical nature of the concept and conceptualize its content in accordance with the essential features of the environment and the challenges facing political science. The concept of “turbulence” is broader in scope and includes the phenomena of risks, dangers, threats. Today, most concepts of turbulence are devoted to the global or international dimension of political reality, but even they are heterogeneous and contradictory. When interpreting turbulence, the concepts of “turbulence”, “crisis”, “chaos”, “danger”, “risk”, “threat” are mixed. Therefore, the urgent task of modern political science is to identify the conceptual content of the category “turbulence” from the standpoint of the possibility of its use in the apparatus of modern political science to study the processes occurring at different levels of socio-political reality. The concept of turbulence allows us to consider destabilization in the political system in a more value-neutral light, focusing primarily on the dynamics, on change. With the concept of turbulence it becomes possible to analyze the driving forces of change in political systems, so the theoretical understanding of turbulence becomes an obvious achievement of modern political science, as it improves the conceptual and categorical apparatus and tools for studying political dynamics. Further conceptualization of the category “turbulence” will contribute in accordance with the current level of scientific knowledge of the interpretation of the dynamics and procedural phenomena of sociopolitical reality at all levels (local, national, regional, global, international).