{"id":20990,"date":"2017-11-30T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-11-29T23:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bezbednost.org\/internal-threats-are-the-cause-of-fear-in-western-balkans\/"},"modified":"2020-07-21T19:36:44","modified_gmt":"2020-07-21T17:36:44","slug":"internal-threats-are-the-cause-of-fear-in-western-balkans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bezbednost.org\/en\/internal-threats-are-the-cause-of-fear-in-western-balkans\/","title":{"rendered":"Internal threats are the cause of fear in Western Balkans"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t{image1}<\/p>\n

\tThreats to the Western Balkans communities are coming from within and the external actors are used only to intimidate voters, so the role of the civil society organizations is to combat these narratives with knowledge. Those are the conclusions of the second panel of the conference organized by the Belgrade Center for Security Policy (BCSP) on the celebration of 20TH<\/sup> anniversary, on the November 28th<\/sup> in Dorcol Platz.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\tThe second panel conference was dedicated to the cooperation of civil society with state authorities, perceptions of threats in the region and the role of civil society in reducing security dilemmas.<\/p>\n

\tWe need to make a difference between the perception of citizens and the perception of government when we talk about security challenges in Albania. While citizens associate the main sources of fear with internal events, authorities are striving to assign responsibility for threats to external factors, says Executive Director<\/strong> of the Institute for Democracy and Mediation from Tirana Sotirac Chroni<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

\t\u2018\u2019Less than 50 percent of Albanian citizens has confidence in state institutions, and the current president accuses the media of creating divisions in society. Corruption, captured state, organized crime, growing authoritarianism – these are the threats that citizens are actually worried about,<\/em> “Chroni said.<\/strong><\/div>\n

\t{image2}<\/p>\n

\tResearcher of Analitika<\/em> from Skopje, Magdalena Lembovska,<\/strong> said that all parties in Macedonia used ethnic tensions to strengthen their political positions, and that media in this process were often abused for political purposes and at the expense of public interest.<\/p>\n

\t“The government of Nikola Gruevski used the media to draw public attention from what is negative in the society,\u00a0 thus making a numerous threats itself. The current Government of Macedonia, on the other hand, uses scrupulous rhetoric and is very careful not to do anything to compare it with the previous regime, “<\/em>Lembovska said.<\/strong><\/div>\n

\tCorruption is the dominant cause of insecurity in Kosovo, while politicians are trying to reduce this threat by saying that it is nothing but the wrong perception of the citizens, says Florian \u0106ehaja<\/strong>, executive director and one of the founders of the Kosovo Center for Security Studies<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

\t“Politicians argue that corruption is merely a matter of perception of the population, while the public opinion polls shows that corruption, foreign policy issues and extremism are the three most important security threats. The rule of law throughout the region is jeopardized by the functioning of the stabilizers, which the European Union supports in fear of new interethnic conflicts<\/em>, “Cehaja said.<\/strong><\/div>\n

\tIn his opinion, the international community has only pretended that it is solving the problem of corruption, which has been increasing in recent years, and that resulted with even higher level of citizen distrust in the EULEX mission.<\/p>\n

\tThe participants agreed that the role of civil society organizations remains very important for overseeing the security sector in the Western Balkans, especially in building integrity and accountability in the times of intimidation.<\/p>\n

\tAfter the conference, Stevan Doj\u010dinovi\u0107, Sandra Ben\u010di\u0107, Vuka\u0161in Obradovi\u0107, Bobana Macanovi\u0107 and Miroslav Had\u017ei\u0107 contributed to the gathering by presenting\u00a0personal experiences of Breaking Fear<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\t\u00a0<\/p>\n

\tConference “Breaking Fear: What C<\/a>an Civil Society Do to Save Accountability of Security Governance in the Time of Fear?<\/a>\u201c was organized\u00a0as part of the BCSP's 20th anniversary celebration. BCSP is the first civil society organization in the Western Balkans specializing in security topics.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\t\u00a0<\/p>\n

\tTranslated by BCSP Intern\u00a0Mijat Kostic<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

{image1} Threats to the Western Balkans communities are coming from within and the external actors are used only to intimidate voters, so the role of the civil society organizations is to combat these narratives with knowledge. Those are the conclusions of the second panel of the conference organized by the …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":14419,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8597,8592,8591],"tags":[9953,7076,7699,7113,9329,7567,7476,7485,7083,7694,4282,7493,7658,4991,6241,7478,8425,7075],"vest_saopstenje":[9454],"coauthors":[164,8671],"class_list":["post-20990","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-accountability","category-activism","category-serbian-security-policy","tag-and","tag-balkans","tag-citizens","tag-civil","tag-civil-society","tag-conference","tag-corruption","tag-government","tag-internal","tag-media","tag-organized","tag-perception","tag-public","tag-security","tag-society","tag-state","tag-threats","tag-western","vest_saopstenje-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bezbednost.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20990","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bezbednost.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bezbednost.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bezbednost.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bezbednost.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20990"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bezbednost.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20990\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bezbednost.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14419"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bezbednost.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bezbednost.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bezbednost.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20990"},{"taxonomy":"vest_saopstenje","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bezbednost.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/vest_saopstenje?post=20990"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bezbednost.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=20990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}