Serbia’s greatest security vulnerability today is not hostile foreign spies. It’s the structure of its own intelligence system.
Built to protect governments rather than the nation, shaped by political loyalty more than professional expertise, Serbia’s security institutions remain poorly adapted to an era of hybrid threats, economic coercion, cyber conflict, and strategic competition.
Cosmetic reform is no longer enough. Serbia needs a new intelligence system.
The problem is older than today’s government, and older than the one before it.
Like many intelligence services across post-communist Europe, Serbia’s security institutions inherited a philosophy from the Cold War period. The security apparatus was primarily designed to protect the political system from internal opposition rather than to protect the state from external threats. That outlook recognized that the likeliest threat to regime survival came from the people not from outsiders, however malevolent.
Loyalty therefore mattered more than professional expertise. Domestic surveillance received greater priority than strategic intelligence. In plain terms, it was a tool of political control and was routinely used against opposition figures and even ordinary citizens. After all, the security services had a prized ability to eavesdrop, intimidate and disrupt; it was a tempting weapon for many post-communist governments across Central and Eastern Europe.
The overthrow of Slobodan Milošević’s regime in October 2000 transformed legislation and organizational charts. But it did not transform institutional culture. Political influence over appointments remained extensive. Parliamentary oversight developed formally but never acquired genuine authority. The operational habits inherited from the previous system — monitoring domestic opponents and serving political principals — persisted well beyond the moment of democratic transition.
So did the absence of accountability and a resort to the so-called black arts. The 1999 assassination of newspaper founder and anti-regime figure Slavko Ćuruvija remains unresolved to this day.
Serbia entered the 21st century with institutions operating inside democratic structures while preserving the reflexes of their authoritarian past.
That legacy matters because the security environment has fundamentally changed.
Serbia’s principal challenges now originate elsewhere: foreign influence campaigns, cyber operations, critical infrastructure vulnerabilities, energy coercion, technological dependency, and strategic competition over supply chains and critical minerals. These are not threats that can be managed through domestic surveillance or internal control. They require strategic intelligence, long-term analysis, inter-agency coordination, and above all, public legitimacy.
An institution designed to monitor political opponents cannot easily switch to become a gatherer and interpreter of complex geopolitical competition. The gap between what Serbia’s security sector was built to do and what it now needs to do has become a strategic liability.
Serbia need not be a passive target. But it will remain vulnerable until it builds institutions capable of recognizing and resisting external pressure — including Russia’s well-documented interest in sustaining precisely this kind of institutional vacuum in the Western Balkans.
Meaningful reform requires more than replacing directors or passing another intelligence law. It requires a redesign of the entire system around clear mandates, genuine accountability, and institutional separation.
First, domestic security, military intelligence, and foreign intelligence must be clearly separated, each anchored to a single ministry with unambiguous lines of responsibility. The current overlapping competencies is not accidental; it is convenient for those who wish to avoid scrutiny, and is damaging to the security of the state.
Second, communications interception must operate under a single, exclusive legal framework, concentrated in one accountable agency and subject to judicial authorization in every case. Dispersed and poorly supervised interception powers are not a security capability. They are a source of institutional corruption and a standing invitation to abuse.
Third, Serbia needs an independent analytical center for strategic assessments — a body whose sole function is to provide the government and parliament with an independent picture of the external strategic environment. Not to monitor domestic opponents and not to serve the political needs of the moment, but to understand the world.
Fourth, senior appointments must depend on professional qualifications rather than political loyalty, with fixed mandates and transparent accountability to parliament. This is not merely an administrative preference. It is the minimum condition for institutions capable of earning — rather than demanding — public trust.
Fifth, parliamentary oversight must become substantive rather than ceremonial. Supervision without access, expertise, and the genuine capacity to sanction wrongdoing is not oversight. It is theater.
Perhaps the most consequential reform concerns neither institutions nor legislation. It concerns trust.
Hybrid threats and foreign influence operations succeed most easily where citizens already distrust their own institutions. Disinformation spreads fastest where official sources have lost credibility. Every confirmed abuse, every politically motivated appointment, every instance of surveillance turned against citizens rather than external threats widens the space available to those who wish to destabilize Serbia from outside.
Public trust is therefore not a democratic luxury. It is a national security asset. An intelligence service that citizens fundamentally distrust cannot effectively protect them, regardless of its budget, its authorities, or its staff.
In an era of great-power competition, intelligence services are no longer instruments of regime survival. They are instruments of national resilience.
Nikola Lunić is a Serbian geopolitical and security analyst and retired Navy Captain. He previously served as Serbia’s Defense Attaché in London and as Executive Director of the Council for Strategic Policy. He is currently a strategic affairs consultant and a regular guest lecturer at the Faculty of Law, University of Osijek. He writes on Balkan security, intelligence governance, and European defense policy for outlets including the Kyiv Post and New Eastern Europe.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
