The World as Existential Security: The Concept of Peace of Third Generation

Abstract

The relevance of the topic is due to the fact that traditional social disciplines have not been able to solve the most important problems of humanity – the elimination of destructive forms of social interactions. The article deals with the problem of conceptualization of the concept of “peace”, the stages of formation of the disciplinary field of peace research. The hypothesis of the study is that understanding the initial intention that prompts the formation of new value orientations in human populations makes it possible to base the modern theory of the world on the concept of existential security. The purpose of the article is to analyze approaches to one of the basic concepts of social and humanitarian disciplines ‒ the category of peace. The use of methods of categorization, retrospective analysis and systematization allowed us to discover the paradigmatic dependence of the content of the concept peace on objective technological and socio-cultural circumstances. The results of the discussion were the following provisions. The first concept of peace, called the negative peace, could not be used as the basis for social construction programs, since it carried all the limitations of the classical paradigm of science, which was formed to serve natural science. The modern, third generation of the concept of peace, which has received the complex name of a multi-inter-transcultural world, is generated by the dangers associated with globalization and entry into digital civilization. Understanding the initial intention that encourages the formation of new value orientations in human populations allows us to base the modern theory of the world on the concept of existential security. The concept of existential security is formulated, which should be understood not as the physical security of an individual, but as the security of the existence of a population that allows preserving the population gene pool. A society that has provided existential security corresponds to people’s ideas of peaceful existence and does not create conditions for war, as one of the forms of violence, or for other forms of structural violence that reduce the adaptive potential of the population. Due to the fact that the adaptability and security of the digital society is ensured by the integrative and communitarian properties of the social system, post-material values are put forward in the first place in the value system in the modern world. They should be the basis of the concept of the existential world.