Voting abroad has also become contested in this cycle, Nedeljkov said. While only about 30,000 Serbians abroad voted in previous elections, more than 100,000 have applied this time. Some polling stations abroad were not opened, with no criteria given, and for the first time voters abroad will vote on Belgrade time, which means voters on the U.S. West Coast will vote overnight.

Two Parallel Realities

Žarković Obradović said the protests have made Serbia’s media scene livelier, with many small, mostly digital outlets, while traditional media remain captured. She described “a simulacrum of pluralism with 2,000 media outlets, but then, effectively, 80% of viewership share is controlled by less than 20 people.” Independent outlets have no access to public funds, and advertising is politically controlled because “in [a] captured state, you cannot do business if you’re not good with the ruling party.” BIRN, she said, has not been granted an interview with a public official in ten years.

She cited BIRN’s recent interview with a ruling-party insider who, under his own name, described a decade of paid work for the party, much of it unlawful: “buying votes, bullying people, beating people.” According to his testimony, he planted provocateurs among protesters to instigate violence that was then blamed on them and drew police action, was paid in cash from the office of a public company’s director, and spent two weeks in the camp that ruling-party supporters have maintained between the Presidency and the National Assembly in Belgrade, where, he said, people were armed and worked with the police. “We all kind of suspected and knew that things like that are happening,” she said. “But we’re not able so far to find somebody who will talk about that under their own identity and to be able to verify all these claims.” Smaller independent outlets carried the story; public service television, she said, did not. “And that’s how two completely parallel realities are created.”

Žarković Obradović was also critical of some of the language often used to describe the political situation in Serbia. “We are talking about polarization most often,” she said, “but I see it as a very asymmetric polarization, with one side having all the resources, and then the other one being exhausted financially, but also institutionally.”

“We have media laws. It is just that they are not implemented,” Žarković Obradović said, and BIRN itself faces several strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs). She also warned of rising physical violence: by one monitoring organization’s count, top officials make at least 100 defamatory public statements about journalists every month, and colleagues who will cover election day “are preparing as if they are going to the war zone.”
 

A Participatory Experiment

Pudar Draško described the student movement as an “advanced participatory experiment within society.” It began as a decentralized movement in the universities, mobilized on social media, and has kept a horizontal structure for almost two years. Facing captured media, students walked from city to city, reaching people who have no access to independent television. “Those were their kids, those were their grandkids, and that really brought some kind of emotion of joy and hope to the people that the change is possible,” she said. “In Serbia, fear changed the sides.”

The movement’s candidate list was assembled over two cycles of open discussion and evaluation, bringing together activists, farmers, and experts. “They do not need leaders. They need a group; they need institutions,” she said. Local assemblies known as zborovi have organized to cover polling stations in Serbia and abroad.

Asked by Fukuyama how a leaderless movement could govern, Pudar Draško said the movement is working out how to choose candidates for president, prime minister, and ministers. With a presidential election to follow, “our period of crisis will not end only on 25th of October, even if there is a clear win there.”

She also described pressure on universities, including salary cuts during the student blockades and the government replacing IFDT’s governing board — the work, she said, of “a regime which is not respecting any rules anymore.”

Election Night and the International Dimension

Responding to audience questions, Pudar Draško said the most likely outcome on election night is that both sides declare victory, and that the student movement has clear strategies to avoid violence and provocation. “The student movement will not try to engage in any kind of violence, and I think this is something which is very important to emphasize,” she said. Žarković Obradović stressed that independent media must be able to report in real time that night. “[The] underlying question of all this is the trust,” she said. “Who can be trusted with counting the votes?”

Nedeljkov said CRTA will observe a representative sample of polling stations, following international methodology for citizen observation, so that the public knows the results, despite what he called “an enormous pressure to kill the witness.” He also warned of politically biased foreign observers, citing the precedent of Georgia, where “the role of international fake observers was to whitewash the elections and election day results.”

An audience member asked whether Western governments were enabling the status quo for geopolitical convenience. “It’s not untrue,” Žarković Obradović said. “Definitely, stabilitocracy and pragmatism are something that we are witnessing, not just in Serbia.” She added that the climate toward Serbia’s ruling party is changing.

View a full recording of the conversation:

*This article was drafted with the assistance of Claude from the event transcript. All quotes were checked against the recording, and the text was reviewed and edited by the author.

The Obama administration’s policy of “re-balance” toward Asia, that began as early as 2009, is now increasingly under stress, as those in the region question American staying power and China emerges as a challenger to U.S. dominance. As the territorial disputes in the East and South China Seas in recent months have demonstrated, China’s relations with the region and the United States have become visibly strained, bringing the U.S. re-balance policy into question and raising concerns about security tensions and the danger of conflict. 

U.S.-China relations are heading, for the foreseeable future, into “a very scratchy time,” predicted Kenneth Lieberthal, a respected senior China scholar at The Brookings Institution, in his keynote speech delivered at the annual Oksenberg Lecture on June 3 at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center.

Lieberthal told a standing room audience in Encina Hall that while the U.S. attempt to temper its relations with China and others has “worked quite well over time,” now, “at a geostrategic level, we seem to be sliding with increasing speed toward an inflection point in U.S.-China relations.”

Lieberthal was joined by a panel of China experts, including Cui Liru of the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR), and Stanford’s Karl Eikenberry and Thomas Fingar, distinguished fellows at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Jean C. Oi, director of the Stanford China Program.

The discussion was part of the Oksenberg Lecture, an annual dialogue that functions as a policy workshop on U.S.-Asia relations, named in honor of late professor and senior fellow Michel Oksenberg (1938–2001). Oksenberg was a noted China specialist, who served as a senior member of the National Security Council and is credited as the architect of the normalization of relations with China under the Carter administration in the late 1970s.

Points of tension in the U.S.-China relationship have been increasingly visible. Senior American officials have assailed China for its aggressive actions toward its neighbors over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands and in South China Sea, including its latest altercations with Vietnam and the Philippines. The United States recently indicted five members of China’s People’s Liberation Army for carrying out cyber espionage against U.S. technology companies.

Incidents like these have prompted both countries to throw harsh words at each other, leading to a situation of brinkmanship. However, Lieberthal pointed out that tense relations between the United States and China are certainly not new. Most notably, relations took a nosedive in 1989 when China cracked down on democratization protests at Tiananmen Square, in 1999 after the accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Serbia, and in 2008, in response to the global financial crisis.

The U.S.-China relationship has been riddled with periods of distrust in the past. But now, “the speed and scale of China’s economic growth, especially over the last two decades, has also increased concerns, on all sides, that the evolving distribution of power may create new frictions and suspicions,” Lieberthal said.

Yet, refusing to work with each other is not an option, the senior scholar, who also served in the Clinton administration, told the audience. Without the United States and China in conversation, progress in multilateral areas such as climate change and trade would falter, he argued. Given the two countries’ position as the world’s largest economies, the international system would effectively be constrained if the two were entrenched in long-term bitterness.

Lieberthal recognized the common admonition, “if we treat China as an enemy, it will surely become one,” saying this warning could be applied to both sides. China and the United States must make greater efforts to manage and mitigate tensions.

“The question is whether we can prevent bad things, not only specific conflicts, but the political tensions and politics that make cooperation on major issues very, very difficult at best.”

He then outlined a few steps that could help China and the United States sort out their disputes. His recommendations began with the need for strong determination on the part of top political leaders to move things forward and the importance of clear, consistent use of vocabulary when discussing issues.

As a final point, but one that was offered as a contingent factor to success, Lieberthal said U.S.-China relations and both countries’ roles in greater Asia will depend on “how effective each of us is in dealing with domestic reforms,” because, “that will determine how dynamic, how vibrant, how innovative, and how secure we feel.”

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During the lecture, Ret. Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry shared his observations from the Shangri-La Dialogue, an inter-governmental security forum held from May 30 – June 1 in Singapore. The Dialogue has in recent years become a gathering of premiere defense ministers to discuss security issues in Track I and “quasi-track” meetings.

Afterward, Eikenberry talked with Shorenstein APARC about key highlights and implications that emerged from the Dialogue:

Shangri-La Dialogue

Photo credit: Flickr/The International Institute for Strategic Studies 

Media reported a tense environment overlaid the Dialogue. What was the general atmosphere there?

The remarks at the Shangri-La Dialogue by Japanese Prime Minister Abe and U.S. Defense Secretary Hagel on the one hand, and Chinese General Wang Guanzhong, made clear very different views on the causes for tension surrounding various maritime sovereignty claims in the East and South China Seas. Still, if you read the full text of all three speeches and the Q&As that followed, there is still great emphasis placed on dialogue and common interests. And in the many meetings that took place between national delegations on the margins of the conference events, the emphasis was on cooperation. 

What revelations at the Dialogue were surprising?

I think the degree to which dissatisfaction with China’s assertive behavior in pursuing its maritime claims was expressed by many of the participants – not just the United States and Japan. Vietnam, the Philippines and India were explicit. Analysts have said the only China (through threatening behavior) could contain China by catalyzing a counterbalancing response. From the results of the Dialogue, I think this is correct.   

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe emphasized values and international law throughout his keynote speech. What is your take on this?

The Prime Minister did emphasize both democracy and rule of law during his prepared remarks and answers to questions from conference participants. He was drawing an obvious distinction between Japan’s and China’s political systems and commitment to approaches to resolving territorial disputes. I think the Prime Minister is trying to establish Japan as a leader in East and Southeast Asia, and wanted to make clear what he views as important differences between the Japanese and Chinese “models.” 

U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel referenced China’s suspension of the U.S.-China Cyber Working Group. What direction do you think the cybersecurity dialogue will go now?

It was unfortunate that China suspended its participation in the U.S.-China Cyber Working Group after the U.S. Government’s indictment of five People’s Liberation Army officers for alleged cyber theft. The U.S. Government has been providing the PRC Government with evidence of cyber theft being conducted by entities in China and has failed to receive any meaningful response so the indictments seem warranted. It would seem that the Cyber Working Group is precisely the forum to discuss this matter and the many related to managing the cyber domain with agreed rules and procedures. Working Groups provide a forum to address disagreement and disputes. I think China’s response was counterproductive and hope the government will indicate a willingness to resume the dialogues in the near future.

Where do you see the regional security conversation heading next?

The risk is that security dialogues will be divided into two camps – one led by the United States and its close allies and partners, and the other by China – somewhat isolated at this time but seeking to entice Asian nations to bandwagon to its side. Perhaps further regional economic integration can facilitate a more common approach to security, but this year’s Shangri-La Dialogue is perhaps a warning that trends, for now, are not heading in a positive direction.