The main finding of this study is that the Serbian public have conflicting views on national and personal security and their relationship with the country\u2019s institutions. On the one hand, people instinctively recognise that the main security threats are internal and are related to poor governance \u2013 such as organised crime and corruption and low levels of trust in institutions that serve the interests of politicians \u2013 which is why they rely on themselves and their own good conduct, from which they derive a sense of personal security. On the other hand, under the influence of media messaging and dominant narratives about threats to national security, presenting a maelstrom of great power rivalry and adversarial actors in the region, they continue to believe that hard power is the best response to security issues. Therefore, they see solutions mainly in the continued strengthening of the country and investment in the security sector.<\/p>\n
Moreover, it is important to bear in mind that public opinion is diametrically opposed to the threats and risks defined by the official National Security Strategy and Defence Strategy adopted last year. Both documents place (the relatively unlikely events of) armed aggression and separatist tendencies within the country in first place on the list of threats to Serbia\u2019s security \u2013 threats that only appear in the lower half on the list of priorities in the eyes of the public, who see human security issues as the priority problems. This discord between public perception and the strategic documents is a consequence of the almost complete lack of public debate during the adoption process of these documents. At the same time, it is testimony to the wrongheaded priorities of Serbia\u2019s security policy, which is clearly at odds with the needs of the public, even though the National Security Strategy cites their subjective feelings in defining national security.<\/p>\n
The public opinion research was conducted September and October 2020 on a randomly selected, representative sample, as a face-to-face survey, ensuring that the findings are statistically valid for the Serbian population as a whole. Eminent public opinion research agencies conducted surveys in the field. Due to the large number of different topics the survey covered, this was conducted in stages, on the basis of three separate questionnaires that were compiled by researchers of the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The findings of public opinion poll were analysed by Belgrade Centre for Security Policy researchers Marija Ignjatijevi\u0107, Bojan Elek and Marija Pavlovi\u0107.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":23166,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8591],"tags":[10527,10784,10785],"vrsta":[9441],"pdfpub":[],"coauthors":[154],"class_list":["post-23169","publikacija","type-publikacija","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-serbian-security-policy","tag-national-security","tag-personal-security","tag-public-opinion","vrsta-analysis"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bezbednost.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/publikacija\/23169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bezbednost.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/publikacija"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bezbednost.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/publikacija"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bezbednost.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bezbednost.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23169"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/bezbednost.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/publikacija\/23169\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31366,"href":"https:\/\/bezbednost.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/publikacija\/23169\/revisions\/31366"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bezbednost.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bezbednost.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bezbednost.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bezbednost.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23169"},{"taxonomy":"vrsta","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bezbednost.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/vrsta?post=23169"},{"taxonomy":"pdfpub","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bezbednost.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pdfpub?post=23169"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bezbednost.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=23169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}