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Most long-term forecasts of global development at the end of the twentieth century that were based on widely accepted scientific approaches and empirical patterns predicted the evolution of globalization as the establishment of a new global social community (a social entity) of a supranational kind and the all-encompassing dominance of cultural and political unification and convergence.

However, the current reality of globalization demonstrates that a global social community is not being formed despite the establishment of a global market, global digital (information) space, and manifold growth of temporary and permanent migration. Furthermore, as economic and informational globalization is expanding, the fragmentation and differentiation of cultures, civilizations, ethnicities and confessions, the “ethnicization’ of the collective consciousness, singling out ethnic identity as the leading one, is skyrocketing universally.

That means that, besides nation states and transnational corporations, global development entities (actors) are joined by an increasing number of social entities of a non-economic and non-state (non-political) nature, including ethnic communities (ethnoses).

Futurologists have had to face the unexpected: the growth of divergent tendencies; the growing number of actors participating in global processes; the revitalization and acceleration of the influence of ethnic and religious communities; the exacerbation of old ethnic and religious conflicts and the appearance of new ones. This contradicts the concepts that were formed in the twentieth century that postulate that humankind’s progress towards convergence, unification or universalization is irreversible; such concepts were based on the idea of continuous ascending progress, a multi-stage approach and economic determinism.

Therefore, social sciences are facing not only a fundamental scientific problem, but also the pressing social and pragmatic task of creating of a new paradigm of sociogenesis that will function in a brand new environment of globalization in a new historical age and that will allow analysis and prediction of the evolution of the leading social processes of our time, including ethnic and cultural phenomena.

Such leading ethnic and cultural phenomena that require theoretical understanding in terms of their social and philosophical positioning include the re-emergence of ethnic communities, ethnicity and ethnic consciousness that is taking place amid the crisis and erosion of modern nationalities.

The concept of globalization as a category of a wider sociopolitical and scientific discourse became widespread in the scientific community after 1991, when the falling apart of the USSR and of the system of its allies eliminated all obstacles to the establishment of a global market of goods and services, including media, allowing significant growth of international trade and migration as well as the global implementation of neoliberal reforms that had been tested not long before that by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

That explains why globalization was seen generally (above all, by Henry Kissinger and Margaret Thatcher,1 its creators and supporters) as a politically determined and largely economic process of spread and universalization of the neoliberal variant of the western economic model and its global victory. All of this created an impression of the imminence of the creation of a global supracommunity, similar to the “end of history’2 explored by Fukuyama and the creation of the global empire3 with a Euro-Atlantic civilizational nucleus and several circles of dependent subject-less periphery.

However, as the results of the establishment of the “united world’ have been manifesting themselves, the need has arisen to study a brand new social reality that is not limited to the phenomena of economic nature and trends of cultural unification and westernization.

The basics of the sociology of globalization were laid down in the works by Wallerstein,4 Bell,5 Giddens6, etc.

Philosophers, such as Kant, Marx, Teilhard de Chardin, Vernadsky, Russell, Toynbee, Jaspers etc., who were developing and substantiating the concept of the gradual ascension of humankind to the united global community were the forerunners of modern studies of globalistics.

The geo-economic and geopolitical aspects of globalization have been studied in the works by Buzgalin and Kolganov,7 Delyagin,8, Inozemtsev,9 Utkin10 and others.

The influence of globalization on the national state and state institutes has been studied by Beck,11 Bauman,12 Kissinger13, Martin and Schumann14, Stryker,15 Soros16, Drucker,17 Butenko,18 Delyagin19, Rieger and Leibfried,20 Kara-Murza,21 Kagarlitsky,22 Podzigun,23 Pantin and Lapkin,24 Pozdnyakov,25 Panarin,26 etc.

The world-systems approach to globalization as a process of an increasingly multi-faceted and all-encompassing interaction of social actors and entities was used by Wallerstein,27 Braudel28, Amin,29,30 and others.

The synergistic approach, based on a somewhat incorrect extrapolation of the pattern in natural science of the emergence of ordered structures in non-equilibrium thermodynamic systems into the social form of being, was used in the works by Budanov,31 Kapitsa32, Moiseyev,33 Podzigun, Panarin,34 Fuller, Shadzhe and others. An indisputable advantage of the synergistic approach is a general presentation of a problem in the creation and gradual sophistication of new structures and entities as a result of the dispersion of flows of energy and matter, which, when applied to social phenomena, may mean the development of divergent social processes.

The problem of the genesis of local social groups – ethnic groups and nations being the most important among them – has an evident interdisciplinary character and is studied under sociology, ethnology, social anthropology, conflictology and ethnopolitics, as well as within history-related disciplines.

The processes of ethnogenesis, nation-building and (looking at it through a broader lens) the building of social communities are studied within three schools of thought: constructivism, instrumentalism, and primordialism.

Primordialism is based on an evolutionary approach to sociogenesis and ethnogenesis. It looks at large groups that have existed for a long time (in particular, ethnic groups and nations) as a result of the long and continuous evolution of social communities that maintain their agency even in the course of deep social transformations of society. Two leading strategies in the ethnology of the nineteenth century, evolutionism and diffusionism, as well as the evolutionist approach in linguistics that allowed specification of the genesis of cultural and linguistic communities, established the basis for the primordialist approach.

Primordialism has two major branches, sociocultural (cultural primordialism) and sociobiological, the latter focusing on the genetic similarities of social groups – ethnic ones above all – as well as on the special social role of an instinctive underlying cause of social behaviour35

The leading approach of modern primordialism is undoubtedly cultural primordialism, which views the genesis of large social groups (ethnic groups and nations) as a result of the evolution of social institutes and social relations. Cultural primordialism in Soviet and Russian science is represented by the works by Bromley, Kozlov, Arutyunov, Mnatsakyan, etc.

The modern sociobiological movement, having overcome the legacy of racial sociogenetic theories of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is mainly represented by ethnogenetic36,37,38,39 and neurogenetic concepts close to behaviourism.40 However, despite its seeming attractiveness, the sociobiological variations of primordialism, at best, explain the formation of tribal communities in a simplified manner. They do not explain the genesis and the patterns of establishment and evolution of more developed and complicated communities, in which culture and politics play a systematically important role.

Constructivism believes the leading mechanism for sociogenesis to be a direct sociopolitical and socioeconomic construction of social communities from top to bottom by political elites, which is usually led through state institutions. Constructivists see modern ethnos as a sociocultural relic, an ideological phantom that the elites used to rule over the masses.41,42,43

The instrumentalists also see this social group as an outcome of a target-oriented activity, not simply as an instrument of power and elites, but as a tool or instrument of the individuals that make up the group that allows use of membership of the group to reach certain goals or to fulfil certain social functions.

Fredrik Barth44 is considered the leader of this movement. Tishkov,45 Guboglo,46 Voronkov and Osvald,47 Shnirelman,48 Kulagin,49 Drobizheva,50 and Lurye,51 as well as recent works by Popov,52 Nizamova,53 Nimayeva,54 Ortobayev55 and others, should be mentioned among Russian scientists subscribing to the constructivist doctrine. Informational and symbolist (identificational) approaches to ethno- and sociogenesis are in line with constructivism and instrumentalism.56,57,58,59

Sociological research interested in the revitalization of ethnic and ethno-social processes in the south of Russia, includes works by Avksentyev,60,61 Abdulatipov,62 Gasanov,63 Gadzhiyev,64 Markedonov,65 Tishkov,66 Tkhagapsoyev,67 Chernous,68 Denisova,69 Zhade,70 Sampiyev,71 Hoperskaya,72 Hunagov,73 Tsutsiyev,74 Shadzhe,75 Shakhbanova76 and others.