In the past couple of years, China has become one of the key investors in heavy industry in Serbia. Chinese increased presence in the country has brought about a great deal of controversy and its largest investments have been accompanied by an increase in pollution levels, sparking great concerns among the local populations. Is the health hazard real or perceived, and who is to blame? The paper seeks answers to this question and analyses the ways by which environmental concerns, governance issues, and a ‘closed’ government are interlinked.

The study examines the (news) domains which shaped public discussions in the period surrounding the July 2020 election in North Macedonia using a data set of the most popular daily tweets in the period between February and August of 2020 and complements this analysis with an examination of the most popular hashtags. The findings show that computational disinformation methods were used to shape public discussions in the period surrounding the election and were primarily based on content aligned with the geo-political goals of foreign actors opposed to the country’s progress on its Euro-Atlantic integration path.

This paper provides original insight into Turkey's engagement in the Serbia's Sandžak region with a particular focus on locals' understanding of the Turkish presence. Its findings are based on extensive field research and confirm the divergence between the perceptions of ethnic Serbs citizens and political elites, and their Bosniak counterparts. However, the study also shows that the Bosniak elites are not homogenous in their view of the Turkish presence in solely positive terms and that Turkey's reputation among the Bosniaks of Sandžak is instrumentalized by local political-interest groups in their mutual clashes.

This paper focuses on the introduction of the Smart City surveillance project in Belgrade, done in cooperation with the Chinese technology company Huawei. It aims to shed light on the ongoing discussions about the use of Chinese technology by Serbian authorities and reviews the concerns shared by some civil society representatives about the use of cutting-edge Chinese technology.

The seventh edition of the PSSI Perspectives brings cyber security into focus. Moreover, it is written by our partners from a leading Estonian cyber security company Cybexer Technologies who delivered a table-top exercise that concluded this intensive week-long educational course. This PSSI Perspective takes a look at four challenges that decision makers face during every major cyber security crisis.

As an educational, research and analytical public policy Institution, PSSI is committed to enriching – and shaping – the Transatlantic security policy debate, especially in more underdeveloped issue portfolios, like the Economic and Financial (E&F) Threat Domain and Space Security, areas in which PSSI enjoys a global leadership position in the NGO community. The Institute also has a long history of tracking several regional security issues.

The Prague Security Studies Institute’s next PSSI Perspective looks at the nexus of disinformation and online advertising.

In a previous study PSSI researchers outlined how disinformation works as a lucrative business for various media platforms. One of their most significant sources of revenue is online advertisement. Fortunately, PR agencies and private companies are increasingly aware of this problem.

This new addition to the PSSI perspectives reacts to the suspension of Jack Ma’s Ant Financial Group on the Chinese Stock Exchanges, on November 3rd, 2020. Drawing on groundbreaking research conducted by our partner RWR Advisory Group, this perspective provides unique insights into the motivations behind the suspension, and, beyond, it offers a forensic analysis which exposes Ant Group’s reprehensible character.

This study brings a new perspective into how domestic and foreign actors’ propaganda methods for disinformation can be used on a social media platform – Twitter. On a case study of North Macedonia during a period close to the 2020 parliamentary election, the author applies original botnet identification techniques to identify a large network of users created in the run-up to the election and sympathetic to VMRO-DPMNE (the country’s right-wing party) and opposed to N. Macedonia’s NATO and EU integration.