Browsing by Subject "EU studies"
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Item Russia in Serbia : development partner or Balkan ghost?(2022-05-05) Kiel, Michael David; Avramov, KirilThis master’s thesis examines how Russian development and media activities influence and interact with politics in Serbia. As a candidate for the European Union, Serbia receives most of its official development assistance (ODA) from the European Commission. However, political development in Serbia has reached an impasse and has even deteriorated in recent years under President Aleksandar Vučić and his Serbian Progressive Party (Srpska Napredna Stranka). International institutions, like the European Parliament, have expressed concern about Serbia’s national politics and its relationship with Russia. While Moscow contributes a relatively small amount of reported assistance to Serbia, many Serbian citizens consider Russia to be Serbia’s most important diplomatic and development partner. To better analyze how Russian activities contribute to politics in Serbia, I focus on two of Russia’s state institutions from 2014 to 2020: Rossotrudnichestvo, the main Russian assistance agency, and Sputnik Serbia (Srbija), one of Russia’s main media agencies. Rossotrudnichestvo operates out of the Russian House for Science and Culture in Belgrade (Ruski Dom) while Sputnik operates national and regional programming from Belgrade. Chapter 2 reviews secondary scholarship to construct a theoretical framework using political science, program evaluation, and digital anthropology. Chapter 3 uses process tracing to find convergence and divergence among Russian state documents, development data, and press releases. Chapter 4 uses a similar methodology to perform structural and narrative analysis on Sputnik stories. Chapter 5 concludes and offers policy recommendations. The appendices provide 1) a table of actors 2) a relational map of Rossotrudnichestvo in Serbia, and 3) an ethnic map of the Western Balkans. I find that Russian agencies operate with the tacit and overt support of key members of Serbia’s government. However, Russian development assistance and media also align with and tap into latent divisions in Serbia, creating ethnically centered networks that challenge Western ideas about public diplomacy, development assistance, and cooperation.