Abstract
<jats:p>Security institutions play a major role in the capture of the state and the collapse of democracy in Serbia. In this research report, BCSP researchers tried to determine how to organise the security institutions and strengthen their external overseers so that the security sector can no longer be easy prey for those who are politically and financially powerful. In other words, the aim was to determine how to ensure that security institutions work in the interest of citizens, precisely as the Constitution of Serbia requires. The starting point of this endeavour were the findings of the previous two BCSP research reports on state capture in the security sector (2020, 2021), in which we identified the “gray areas” and “veto points” within this sector, that is, legal and institutional solutions that made it possible to capture these institutions quite easily. We verified the solutions for the reorganisation of these gray areas in a series of interviews with former and current employees of the security institutions and the judiciary, diplomats, journalists, attorneys, politicians and representatives of civil society. The structure of the research report follows separate security institutions - intelligence service, police and the armed forces, complemented by chapters on oversight bodies, foreign policy and special mechanisms to overcome state capture.</jats:p>