Conceptualization of the foreign research discourse on the problems of social security in the Russian-Chinese border area

Kononov Sergey Viktorovich

The aim of the study is to conceptualize the discourse of Western studies devoted to the aspects of social security of the Russian-Chinese border area. The objectives of the study are to identify aspects of social security in Western descriptions of the Russian-Chinese borderlands in the XVII-XIX centuries; to determine the degree of influence of political conjuncture on the interpretation of the social security of the Russian-Chinese borderlands; to analyze modern transformations of the critical concept of social development of the Russian-Chinese border areas in the XXI century. The novelty of the study is determined by the fact that it is the first to conceptualize the assessments of factors and patterns of the formation of social security on the territory of the Russian-Chinese border in the works of European and American authors. The methodology of the research suggests the need to use the methods of critical analysis, comparative-historical and hermeneutical methods, systematization, but it is impossible without a certain reduction, abstraction and modeling. The result is to determine the vector of formation of the methodology of Western studies of the social security of the Russian-Chinese border area from early idealizations to positivist descriptions and the "critical concept", where Russia was assigned the role of a social threat. The second result is the identification of the content of the critical concept of social security of the Russian-Chinese border area, which consists in the fact that Russian-Chinese relations are perceived by Western researchers as a factor of lagging behind the development of regional society from the global level. The third result is an analysis of the transformation of the critical concept of social security of the Russian-Chinese border area, which consists in recognizing the independence of this regional space and its dependence not so much on Western trends in globalism, but on the influence of East Asian players, among which China is the leading one.

Keywords:Social security, China, Russia, Russian-Chinese border area, Western studies of Russian-Chinese interaction, critical concept of social security of the Russian-Chinese border area.