Navigating Uncertainty in the Transitional Media and Political Systems of the Western Balkans

We continue this second day of the ECREA 2024 conference with the second conference keynote, by Jelena Kleut. Her focus is on uncertainties in transitional media systems. She begins by noting the various present-day communicative disorders – disinformation, political dysfunction, hate speech and abuse, etc. – but also warns us not to lose track of the positive potentials of contemporary communication technologies amongst all the doom and gloom. A balanced assessment of the current situation remains critical.

This points to a considerable level of uncertainty, too – and this can be generative (of research, and of overall progress for society), but equally also produce social and societal anxieties that lead citizens to seek easy answers and solutions. Jelena’s focus here is on the countries of the western Balkans, which have been described as ‘transitional democracies’ for the past 30 years at least; here, too, uncertainties persist, and may be divided into top-down, structurally driven uncertainties and bottom-up, audience-driven uncertainties.

These are reflected for instance in mainstream media reporting approaches, and the dissemination of disinformation that surrounds or responds to this reporting. Why does such disinformation circulate? At the structural, top-down level we have been seeing the rise of a politics of uncertainty, used as a tool by autocrats and illiberal forces to shore up their systems of electoral authoritarianism. This connects with the capture of state and societal institutions by such political actors, which makes the actions of these institutions themselves uncertain and unreliable as they are no longer based on the rule of law and democratic foundations. Such electoral authoritarian governments also control access to information, therefore.

Bottom-up uncertainties respond to this structural arrangement, and are expressed in the behaviours of citizens as they navigate these institutional and communicative landscapes; this is in part also directed by the political forces controlling these structures, then. The various small bottom-up acts of everyday citizens can also aggregate into powerful responses and challenges to these structural setting, however – but it is often the less privileged who take on the highest burden of responding to such structures.

There are of course notable differences in how these dynamics unfold in different contexts; some societies are more resilient to uncertainty than others, and the resources that enable bottom-up responses are not equally distributed. This was notable for instance in the Media 2040 project, in which students from western Balkans countries envisaged how they wanted their media systems to look in the year 2040: key elements that emerged from this, for instance, were the safety of journalists, and freedom from political influence (thereby reflecting long-standing present-day deficits – uncertainties – in their countries). EU membership and the legal frameworks it introduces also emerges as a factor in all of this, but is often seen as a development that remains in the far distant future, even in spite of a long-term process of EU affiliation.

From a bottom-up perspective, local media are also crucial, but these outlets increasingly struggle to remain commercially viable. What happens in Serbia and other western Balkans countries is not the disappearance of local news, though, but an abundance of local media offerings – but these are often affiliated with political interests, and subsidised by electoral authoritarian political forces; these are pushing independent news outlets out of the market, and contribute to the creation of an illiberal public sphere.

Such developments place a burden of self-reliance on local citizens; they are forced to sift through commercial and social media updates to find actually relevant information, and this process leads to further uncertainty about whether they have truly informed themselves sufficiently. This can be understood as a state of ‘news doubt’: citizens do not trust the sources they encounter, and therefore seek out ever more diverse sources; from this complex information picture, and reading between the lines, they must attempt to piece together the full picture. Such an attitude of uncertainty is sound under the circumstances, but also very exhausting.

Some local outlets even seek to operate in such highly politicised contexts by choosing not to formally report on political matters at all, but – in the context of small local communities – pass on political information instead by word of mouth; this creates very different bottom-up information streams. Can this be understood as a form of resilience, or even resistance? Resilience highlights elements of individual agency and adaptation to uncertain contexts, but in environments where state institutions actively produce uncertainty that concept may not be appropriate – resistance might be the more relevant term here.