Personal Safety and Security Culture – Similarities and Differences

Abstract

There are briefly presented two trends in security sciences developed in the last 10 years: the issues of security culture and the issues of personal safety. Both approaches to security designate methods of threefold insight into the state of security and ways to improve it for an individual and a group. The subject of the discussion will be a comparative analysis of these two approaches to securitology. The research hypothesis is that the approach focused on personal safety emphasizes the importance of the cultural tradition of an individual or group, while the approach focused on the culture of security raises the importance of appropriate shaping of the security structure. This correspondence clearly refers to the determinants of personal safety. The discussed topic is very important for the development of theoretical securitology, especially in connection with the increasingly topical issues of the so-called multiculturalism in a globalizing world. Determinants of personal safety make it possible to study (also in an empirical way) of the individual and group feelings of security. In this way, the combination of the security culture and the presented concept of personal safety opens the way to the humanization of securitology.