almanac on security sector oversight in the Western Balkans

dominantly discussed from collectivist and ethno-nationalist perspectives. Information
about which security actor is in charge of which domain, what their competencies are,
who controls different actors and what their budgets are is not openly available. This
lack of transparency impedes national oversight of the security sector (including by
civil society) and impedes confidence building necessary for regional security cooperation.
Hence, an impartial mapping of the security sector in each Western Balkan
country was an integral early stage of the project, to facilitate the later process of
measuring and grading.
The Western Balkan societies do not have a long tradition of citizen participation in
the oversight of security sector governance. As a consequence, traditional security actors
have more expertise and credibility than most civil society organisations. We hope
to use our Index of SSR to contribute to the increased visibility of civil society organisations
in security policy communities, as well as their increased credibility amongst
the general public. Therefore, we expect that putting forward empirical evidence will
help create an environment for debate based on rational arguments and replicable
research. Any recommendations made based upon our research gains credibility from
the fact that our evidence was collected in a systematic manner using clear benchmarks
for the success or failure of SSR.
13 . Challenges
The major challenges of implementing this methodological framework have been: dependency
on public sources, aggregating grades for entire sectors and acquiring comprehensive
understandings of security sector actors’ distinctive features.The amount
of data available and the types of sources used, and consequently the grades given,
were often indicative of the level of transparency in the work of different security sector
actors. Institutions which granted researchers access to data gained an opportunity
to make potential progress in their reform known to the public and therefore to be
assessed more thoroughly. On the other hand, non-transparent institutions risked having
the changes they had made pass unnoticed by the public, resulting in lower grades
due to the lack of available data. For example, during the first cycle of the Serbian
case study the Ministry of Interior, intelligence agencies, judiciary and prisons all failed
to provide the number of their employees, nor did they provide any data on human
resources management. The researchers tried to overcome this problem by collecting
data from secondary sources and by triangulation with media sources. Consequently,
the grades for these actors were lower than for other actors that provided required
data or made it available on their websites.
The most difficult challenge has been aggregating findings at the sector level. This requires
advanced understanding of individual actors (e.g. police, military, intelligence,
PSCs, etc.) and their interplay. As background literature and empirical data is more
available for traditional security providers, final research findings contain disproportionally
more data and analysis for these two ‘usual suspects’ than for other actors. It
has proven almost impossible to collect data on non-statutory actors (e.g. private se-
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