The publication aims to analyze public security and public order in conceptual and institutional terms as an analytical category of security sciences. The legislator defines neither public security nor public order. So far, they have been treated mainly as categories of administrative law. It is therefore important to assign them analytical content in the new scientific discipline. The research results allowed for the presentation of the thesis that public security and public order are mainly connected with protection against pathological phenomena occurring in the public space, which are minimized by institutions established to ensure it. These categories should constitute the research field (subject) of the security sciences. The research problem formulated in the form of the question: How are public security and public order treated in definitional and institutional terms? The problem was solved based on a critical analysis of the literature. The paper uses theoretical research methods, including analysis of literature and phenomena occurring in society and inference – as a cognitive factor of the subject of analysis. A critical analysis of the literature on this issue played a large role in the cognitive process.

The article attempts to address the issue of the need to distinguish sub-disciplines in security sciences. A scientific discipline is a basic and lowest-order category within the classification system of individual fields of science. Security science in Poland has been classified as one of many disciplines in the field of social sciences. The problem was formulated as a question: based on which criteria can sub-disciplines be distinguished in the security sciences? The aim is to identify the basic sub-disciplines in security sciences and to propose a criterion for their distinction. Critical literature analysis and research design were adopted as the primary methods. There is no established criterion for the division into individual sub-disciplines in Poland. The author proposes to distinguish sub-disciplines based on the following criteria: theoretical, practical, types of institutions, and levels of organization of different security sectors. It is based on the assumption that security sciences require a clarification of the substantive scope within sub-disciplines through which the discipline’s identity can be built up, and research can be carried out as part of further scientific work.