How to Unbind the State Capture in Serbia? Towards Security Institutions and Foreign Policy in the Service of Citizens

The Belgrade Centre for Security Policy (BCSP) was one the first organisations in Serbia to notice this negative trend; consequently, in 2019 and 2020, we investigated and documented in detail the role of the security intelligence services, the police, the army and private security companies in capturing the state, as well as the impotence of oversight and control bodies.

In the research that followed in 2021, we established that the government of the Serbian Progressive Party, led by Aleksandar Vučić, had completed the capture of the state and that today’s security institutions are operating with the aim of preserving such a state of affairs. We also researched the foreign policy aspects of this negative process. Public opinion surveys conducted by BCSP have also established that the majority of the citizens are aware that Serbia is a captured state, i.e. that politicians, organised into interest groups, use state institutions together with financially powerful actors to further strengthen their political and financial power, all to the great detriment of citizens. Since state institutions are deeply captured and the citizens are aware of that fact, we have decided not to further document this process; in this study, we rather tried to determine how to organise the security institutions and strengthen their external overseers so that the security sector can no longer be easy prey for those who are politically and financially powerful. In other words, we wanted to determine how to ensure that security institutions work in the interest of citizens, precisely as the Constitution of Serbia requires. The starting point of this endeavour were the findings of the above mentioned BCSP research, in which we identified the “gray areas” and “veto points” within the security sector, that is, legal and institutional solutions that made it possible to capture these institutions quite easily. We verified the solutions for the reorganisation of these gray areas against the opinions of our interlocutors, former and current employees of the security institutions and the judiciary, diplomats, journalists, attorneys, politicians and representatives of civil society. We verified the solutions for the reorganisation of these gray areas against the opinions of our interlocutors, former and current employees of the security institutions and the judiciary, diplomats, journalists, attorneys, politicians and representatives of civil society. The interviews helped us to confirm, but also to refute our assumptions.

The recommendations we came up with through our research are intended for those holders of political power who want to reform the security institutions of Serbia.