Non-territorial autonomy (NTA) serves as a category of practice in politics, public administration and civil activism. Being applied an analytical category NTA has acquired a variety of meanings including a function of organization, guarantees of individual liberties in certain spheres, recognition and maintenance of group boundaries and membership etc. In fact, practical and analytical applications of NTA do not differ from one another. The main problem with employing NTA as an analytical category in every discipline stems from the dominant essentialist and group-centric approach. Almost all interpretations of NTA implicitly or explicitly rest on uncritical and often unreflective reification of notions such as ‘group’, ‘community’, and ‘culture’ and assume that a group is a self-evident social actor and an internally cohesive social unit (this can be called a ‘thick’ interpretation). This significantly limits the analytic perspective and obstructs important research agendas. If this assumption is withdrawn and ethnic group is regarded as merely as a way of framing certain activities, most respective interpretative schemes collapse. The author suggests that ‘thin’ interpretations NTA as a category of analysis not based on a ‘groupist’ approach can have a room of its own. There might be two interpretations which do not duplicate the already existing terminologies. First, NTA may be interpreted as a top-down official policy of diversity accommodation centred on the perception that ethnic/cultural groups must be addressed with special measures aimed at facilitation of their non-territorial self-organisation. The second interpretation can apply in the domain of public administration and thus can be conceived as ‘new public management’ or ‘indirect administration’ in ethno-cultural sphere, as a combination of self-government with regular allocation of public resources. There is no doubt, besides, that a researcher can distance him/herself from NTA as a practical category and study the modes and outcomes of its employment.
