SOCIAL REPRESENTATIONS OF INTELLIGENCE AND SECURITY CULTURE IN ROMANIA

As NATO and EU member state, Romania is nowadays a reference point in the array of concepts such as security culture, democracy, civilian control, etc. Therefore, the image that some institutions publicly display is highly important in building a security culture. On the very basis of this image, a future security culture could be built. Studying the image of organizations has a short history in Romania, although the research of image characteristics is essential, in the eye of the target public, in order to set up a Western-European type of security culture. Using surveys and interviews as key research methods, we intend to launch the thesis that the better the image of security institutions/organizations is, the higher the rate of success in building a viable security culture. Yet there is another hypothesis: the negative characteristics of the secret services fade out following the 1989 Revolution.