POLITICAL SCIENCE AS IT WILL BE: STATE AND PERSPECTIVES OF THE DISCIPLINE

The article addresses the dilemmas and challenges faced by political science at the beginning of the 21st century. Special attention is paid to the understanding of the state and democracy, whereby the article in the first part problematizes the dominant geographical interpretations of the state in political science, which still limit or even define it only as a geographically demarcated and unchanging territory. We point out the loss of analytical sharpness in such treatments of the state, as they completely overlook the processes of redefining and redistributing the state, and thus the processes of its de-/reterritorialization and spatial restructuring, when the state is forced to adapt to economic dynamics and not the other way around. An often unreflected danger of the "territorial trap" in the treatment of the state is the simultaneous limitation of the chronotope for understanding and researching democracy. In the second part, the article analyzes the main theories of democracy and identifies their limitations. He concludes that, at first glance, heterogeneous and mutually exclusive considerations are connected by a similar sentiment - political agoraphobia, as well as the mistaken equation of democracy with the rule of the people, which is realized through state-building projects. On the basis of current approaches in the research of the state and democracy, the last part of the article proposes new (meta)theoretical, epistemological and methodological approaches in political science research.