Displacing Methodological Nationalism in the Anthropocene: Grounded Normative Theory and the Voices of the Displaced

Democratic theory often presumes that the demos, the site of political voice, and the scope of justice align with the nation-state. This paper argues that this alignment is not merely a substantive commitment but a methodological inheritance—one sustained by the widespread reliance on methodological nationalism (MN) across both normative political theory and empirical political science. MN functions as an epistemic border regime: it naturalises the nation-state as the default unit of political analysis and moral concern, and in doing so structures what counts as a plausible democratic problem, what evidence is admissible, and whose claims can appear as intelligible reasons in public argument. In this sense, methodology is not a neutral toolkit but a political practice that allocates voice and political standing. The figure of the climate-displaced person, misframed through state-centric categories, governed through bordering practices, and frequently rendered rightless, makes these methodological distortions especially visible, because their claims emerge precisely where territorial membership and the conventional sites of democratic justification break down. To contest this epistemic closure, the paper develops epistemic de-bordering as a methodological paradigm for reconfiguring the relationship between empirical inquiry and normative justification under transboundary conditions. Epistemic de-bordering unites method as critique—diagnosing how MN fixes the boundaries of democratic concern and structures political knowledge—with method as voice, operationalised through Grounded Normative Theory (GNT). GNT’s commitments to recursivity, comprehensiveness, epistemic inclusion, and accountability provide a disciplined yet flexible approach for integrating empirical insights into normative theorising without collapsing one into the other. The resulting normative claims are provisional and revisable, and their authority depends on their responsiveness to experiences of injustice that exceed territorial membership—thereby strengthening the methodological credentials of democratic legitimacy in contexts where those affected are not co-citizens. A three-step design illustrates the approach: (1) constructing a provisional climate-rights framework grounded in redistribution, recognition, representation, and reparation; (2) semi-structured dialogical interviews as sites of co-theorisation with climate-displaced persons along the Sahel–EU corridor; and (3) recursive reconstruction of climate-rights claims across plural empirical vocabularies, tensions, and struggles. The paper shows how democracy is not only what we theorise but how we theorise: methodological architectures that pre-border the field of reasons undermine democratic ideals at their source, while epistemic de-bordering offers a concrete model of political theorising as an accountable, inclusion-sensitive practice of justification capable of addressing transboundary injustice in the Anthropocene.