Boosting Resilience to Organised Crime in the Western Balkans

Fight against organised crime has been at the top of the list of priorities of the Western Balkans governments, at least at a declaratory level, for at least a decade now. While it is a general understanding that the results leave much to be desired, there is a gap in both administrative and survey-based data available to the public, which makes it difficult to determine how effective state responses are.

There is a general agreement that the role of civil society organisations in tackling organised crime is substantial, although there is a little understanding of what they do and how exactly they contribute to this goal. In the Western Balkans, their role is even further amplified, owing to the fact that all governments in the region have elements of state capture and for some there are even proven links with organised crime groups.

The starting point for the debate are two forthcoming research reports produced by WB OCR team, the main findings of which will be presented by the authors and then reflected upon by external experts in the field.

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Western Balkans Organised Crime Radar (WB-OCR) came into existence as a civil society initiative in response to the ever-increasing harm caused by the organised crime to the citizens of the Western. It intends to bridge the gaps between the societal needs to tackle organised crime, commitments made by the governments of the WB6, and the lacklustre performance of their policies on the ground. The initiative intends to generate bottom-up demand for greater performance of the WB6 governments through streamlining civil society actions into more coherent advocacy efforts backed with rigorous evidence. The work of WB OCR is generously supported by the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Belgrade, Royal Norwegian Embassy in Belgrade and the Balkan Trust for Democracy, a project of the German Marshall Fund of the United States.