The concept and the essence of personal security

Abstract

Security is a concept defined in various ways. It is often emphasized that it is one of the constitutive attributes of human beings that define their activity. Presently, there is a tendency to eschew the state-centric concept of security in favour of the anthropocentric one. The fact that the main focus of this anthropocentric concept of security is on personal security situates the above issue within the area of security culture. The contemporary analysis of the threats that affect human safety requires the identification of diverse cause-and-effect relationhips in the complex postmodern reality, both material and non-material one. The emergence of the category of risk, on the other hand, implies the necessity of shifting the key security-related foci from the subjective sphere to the sphere of personal safety. The article is an attempt to systematize the concept of personal security and define its essence in the perspective of security sciences. For the sake of such a research objective, the problem has been formulated in the following way: What is the essence of personal security and how is it defined in the field of security sciences? The issue has been little studied so far, and the adopted qualitative approach forces the author to abandon the research hypothesis, as a non-assumptive approach has been taken in the task of investigating the researched concept. The work uses the method of the critical analysis of subject literature. The resulting systematisation of knowledge in the researched area is an attempt to review the concepts used in security sciences in such a way that allows to organize the concepts regarding personal security.