In a deep dive into the Humanities, I have framed, since 2019, the theoretical construct of Cultural Globalized Commons (CGC) as a transnational, digitally mediated sphere in which symbols, narratives, and practices circulate across borders and become partially shared without fully erasing local particularities. Within this space, I conceptualize Sociocultural Replacement Values (SCRVs) as adaptive normative configurations that enable societies and groups to maintain coherence, legitimacy, and conflict-mitigating capacities under conditions of accelerated cultural contact, mediatization, and soft-security threats.
Cultural Globalized Commons
My notion of the Cultural Globalized Commons extends classical concepts of the global commons by shifting attention from material resources (oceans, atmosphere, polar regions) to shared symbolic and communicative infrastructures that are increasingly structured by digital platforms, algorithmic curation, and networked publics. These infrastructures form a common arena in which global media content, transnational advocacy campaigns, commercial branding, and state or non-state strategic communications converge and compete for attention, meaning, and norm-setting authority.
Rather than producing simple homogenization, I characterize the CGC by what I describe as “partial convergence”: actors selectively appropriate, translate, and hybridize global cultural elements, creating overlapping normative repertoires that coexist with—rather than fully override—locally entrenched value systems. This partial convergence is visible in domains such as human rights discourse, digital participation norms, and globalized protest repertoires, where common frames are recognizable, yet strategically reinterpreted through national, ethnic, religious, or class-specific lenses.
Sociocultural Replacement Values
Within the globalized cultural field, I conceptualize SCRVs as context-responsive “cultural shock absorbers” that emerge when existing value structures are strained by new expectations, technologies, or governance regimes. They function as intermediary value-sets that reinterpret or partially substitute traditional norms, thereby maintaining social order and identity continuity while accommodating systemic pressures such as digitalization, migration, and evolving security narratives.
In social-theoretical terms, I understand SCRVs as a meso-level mechanism between macro-level structural change and micro-level value socialization: they stabilize expectations, justify institutional reforms, and provide motivational orientations that reduce cognitive and affective dissonance in periods of rapid transformation. Rather than indicating a linear erosion of “old” values, I see SCRVs as suggesting a patterned re-articulation of what is seen as legitimate authority, acceptable risk, and morally defensible action under new conditions, for example in data ethics, platform governance, or counter-extremism policy.
Identity, Resilience, and Soft Security
Through the lens of identity and cohesion research, I argue that SCRVs contribute to societal resilience by providing new symbolic anchors that link globalized norms—such as inclusivity, non-violence, or media literacy—to existing narratives of national or community identity. By re-coding elements like human rights, gender equality, or minority protection as compatible with, or even constitutive of, national self-understandings, I believe SCRVs can mitigate perceived zero-sum conflicts between “tradition” and “globalization.”
Empirical Operationalization
In the domain of soft security and P/CVE (preventing and countering violent extremism), my framework clarifies how “value vacuums” arise when long-standing normative orders lose binding force, while functional replacement values are not yet socially sedimented. Under such conditions, extremist milieus can present themselves as providers of coherent, status-giving, and emotionally compelling “replacement values,” offering simplified moral binaries and closed worldviews that exploit uncertainty in the wider CGC.
Methodologically, I find that the CGC and SCRV concepts lend themselves to mixed-methods, digitally enriched inquiry, where AI-assisted text mining and NLP-based taxonomies are used to identify semantic shifts, co-occurring value labels, and the diffusion of normative frames across platforms and languages. Tagging taxonomies and value vocabularies can be calibrated to detect how terms associated with democracy, security, diversity, or participation are recontextualized over time, thereby allowing for the empirical tracing of SCRVs as they gain or lose discursive salience.
Value Convergence and Pluralism
The CGC/SCRV framework I propose suggests that value convergence under globalization is less about uniformity than about constructing minimally shared, functionally necessary normative baselines that permit cooperation across deep diversity. These baselines can include commitments to non-violent conflict resolution, procedural fairness, and epistemic responsibility in information sharing, which are then refracted through different cultural traditions but remain recognizable as part of a shared normative grammar.
Within nation-states, I argue that SCRVs can facilitate pluralism: the coexistence of multiple life-worlds bound together by an operationally crucial layer of replacement values that limit escalatory dynamics and reduce the probability of systemic “clashes of civilizations.” By embedding SCRVs intelligently in education, media practices, and everyday digital interactions, I believe societies can participate in processes co-shaped by Cultural Globalized Commons while preserving meaningful forms of distinct identity.
Thorsten Koch, MA, PgDip
Policyinstitute.net
11 January 2026
(Refined with the aid of Perplexity)
