Social vulnerability of the population of Ukraine in the focus of strengthening national security

Abstract

The article emphasizes the vulnerability of the Ukrainian population in terms of risks and threats of a full-scale war of Russia against Ukraine, primarily in the determinants of the political, economic, and social components with a priority emphasis on the importance of security. Attention is focused on the review of the factors of the geopolitical and geoeconomic nature of vulnerability, especially in the socio-humanistic context in relation to the Ukrainian population. The article shows that social vulnerability highlights the disturbance of the balance of stability of dynamic equilibrium in the vital activity of the “population” system at various levels of its organization, which reflects the well-being of a human on riskogenic influences in the social environment in the ratio of the terms “vulnerability – sustainability”, generating corresponding changes in one’s vital activity in further stochastic life strategies. The problems of social vulnerability are highlighted especially through the economic sector. When considering the multifactorial nature of its occurrence, diagnosis, assessment, analysis, and forecasting of the consequential effects of the manifestation of many stressful situations, social vulnerability is tracked through the optics of the reflection of the population itself on the growth of risks and threats of various origins. The article suggests a concept of social deficit, which reveals the phenomenon of imbalance in society’s ability to meet the needs of citizens in social security protection against vulnerability in the conditions of uneven socio-economic development of regions and violation of the proportions of their social protection potential. At the same time, the characteristics of the emergence, manifestation, and accumulation of socially acceptable deficits of a safe society are markers of the understanding of social vulnerability, which delineate the boundary that the society in riskgenous states should not cross due to the reasons of falling into particularly difficult social conditions due to limited resources for further satisfying the needs and rights of the population.