Stevan Dojčinović on Uniting Balkan Journalists to Combat Organized Crime

K2.0 is bringing the award winning editor-in-chief of KRIK (Crime and Corruption Reporting Network) to Prishtina for our latest Volume Up talk and masterclass.

Stevan Dojčinović is an investigative reporter based in Belgrade. He specializes in investigating organized crime, corruption, privatization deals, money laundering, private security agencies and the gambling industry.

In 2015, with a group of five journalists, he founded KRIK, a non-profit organization established to improve investigative journalism in Serbia. KRIK is part of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), an international consortium of non-profit investigative centers and for-profit independent media organizations all around the world, from the Balkans and Eastern Europe to Central Asia.

Stevan is the author of the book “Šarić — Kako je balkanski kokainski kartel osvojio Evropu” (“Šarić — How the Balkan Cocaine Cartel won Europe”), about the role of the Balkan mafia in international cocaine smuggling. He also teaches journalists how to collect and analyze business data and property records.

Stevan and KRIK have won multiple international awards for their investigative reporting. Last year alone he picked up the 2018 Award for Outstanding Merits in Investigative Journalism, the Data Journalism Award and the “Dušan Bogavac” Journalism Award for ethics and courage.

At K2.0, he will be speaking about the significant role of organized crime in everyday life in the Balkans, and how powerful these forces are in shaping countries’ politics. He says that while Balkan countries are strongly divided by their borders and coexist in tension, organized crime knows no national borders and efficiently operates across countries.

Because of a lack of trust between state agencies in the Balkans, law enforcement struggles to deal with the issue. Nowadays, he believes it’s on investigative journalism to play the most important role in revealing the wrongdoings of organized crime groups. Our success in this, he says, will be determined by the extent to which journalists from different Balkan countries are ready to team up and work together.

Join us at K2.0’s space at 18:00 on Thursday, April 25 to hear Stevan share his experience and ideas on how we can work more closely together to combat organized crime.

The following day (Friday, April 26), the masterclass will take place at K2.0’s space between 10:00 and 14:00. Please register for a limited place at the masterclass here no later than Wednesday, April 24.K

*Translation will be available in English/Albanian.

This Volume Up Edition is supported by a grant funded by the “Luxembourg support for civil society in Kosovo” project, financed by the Government of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and managed by Kosovar Civil Society Foundation (KCSF).