The article explores the essential content of the legal mechanism for ensuring social security in modern Ukraine. It establishes that this mechanism consists of elements consistent with legal principles – specifically, the forms, methods, and means provided by current legislation to ensure social security. It also encompasses processes and relationships through which the actors responsible for social security plan, create, protect, defend, and restore conditions to either eliminate social risks or, where elimination is not feasible, provide compensation. The author argues that this legal mechanism exhibits several unique characteristics. First, it has a clear systemic and organisational nature, based on the general social and related policies of the state. Second, it operates on the principle of combining general norms of social legislation with specific norms of administrative legislation. Third, it considers the specific real and potential social risks and challenges to the state’s social security, with applicability to the entire population. Fourth, it enables a system of actors responsible for ensuring the state’s social security. The article indicates that the legal mechanism for ensuring social security, as a distinct legal structure, constitutes a complex system of elements. The key components of this system are, first, the principles for ensuring the state’s social security. Second, an important component is the set of current legislative norms that regulate various aspects of social security. Third, an essential component consists of the actors of social security – both collective and individual legal entities. These actors, in accordance with their legal status and the principles of social solidarity and responsibility, plan, organise, and implement activities aimed at preventing and minimising social threats. They work to stabilise and develop society in response to internal and external challenges affecting the state’s level of social security. The article concludes by summarising the findings of the research.
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