TERRORISM AND TRANSNATIONAL CRIME – VIEW FROM SERBIA

Zirojević, Mina (2016) TERRORISM AND TRANSNATIONAL CRIME – VIEW FROM SERBIA. Nauka i društvo : bilten (2). pp. 29-47. ISSN 2335-0792

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Abstract

In this article author tries to link theory and practice in terms of differentiating organized crime and terrorism in Serbia. Traditional definitions of organised crime tend to focus on its links with the market. In fact, they depict organised crime as an alternative industry based on the stable supply of a criminal market, characterised by the use of force or threat by it, and motivated by illicit profit or a quest for political power. These definitions arise from the historically most common depictions of specific activities of organised crime, which in most parts of Europe and North America have traditionally been associated with the illegal collection of debts, extortion rackets, contract murders or systemic corruption leading to, and associated with, a transnational trade in drugs. Through the evolution of the definitions, these stereotypes have gradually waned away, and the use of violence, as well as the primary motivation by material profit, has been omitted from the lists of obligatory characteristics that a crime must fulfil in order to be classified as “organised crime”. More recently, in the European Union definition, the use of violence and motivation by profit alone have been made only conditional criteria, and the quest for institutional power has been recognised as a motivating factor for organised crime equal to that of generating illicit profit. These new definitional approaches have opened the way to revolutionary ways of understanding the development of organised crime, specifically to including white-collar crime and massive fraud in the future definitions of organised crime, and to elaborating further the aspect of political violence that appears worrisomely present in many organised crime activities across the world. In the Balkans, these new moments in defining organised crime appear to have been tested particularly directly in Serbia, where, first, there has been a long public debate over a systematic “siphoning away” of public funds to the accounts of private companies through the mass corruption of a former, post-communist government until 2001, and where subsequently organised criminal rings have been accused of having masterminded and executed the assassination of the late Serbian Prime Minister, Dr Zoran Đinđić. The Balkans, and particularly Serbia, has been exposed to some of the most destructive consequences of the two novel aspects of organised crime. Correspondingly, the region can serve as a polygon or testing grounds for the exploration of these conceptual issues..

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