The Senjak Case Is Not the Exception: How Corruption Became a Form of Economic Rationality

A few weeks ago, in a restaurant in central Belgrade, I was waiting for a waiter. At the next table sat two gentlemen in their late forties, in suits that were not bought in Centar or on Banovo Brdo.

The conversation was loud, in a friendly way. One was explaining to the other that for a tender at a public utility company, “we needed to put together a combination with the colleagues from the other branch.” He added: “Nothing illegal, just everyone needs to know their role.”

The other nodded, as though all of this were perfectly understandable, even desirable. He replied: “Of course, how else would it work.”

I could not help hearing. They were sitting two meters away. By my conservative count, the conversation lasted around forty-five minutes, with a tender figure mentioned several times and well above 100 million dinars. When they parted, they shook hands, patted each other on the shoulder, and walked out.

The Senjak case is not rare, it is typical

The reason I bring this scene up now, after news of the Senjak case (former chief of the Belgrade police directorate Veselin Milic has been taken into prosecutorial custody, with a thirty-day detention order and a fresh arrest within the past week), is the following. The Senjak case is sociologically significant not because it is rare but because it is typical.

In any week in Belgrade, dozens or hundreds of conversations like the one I happened to overhear take place, only without prosecutorial attention. That attention arrives when one of the networks breaks, when someone in it changes their story, or when the political positions of those who decide who helps whom shift.

In other words, prosecutorial attention is politically selective, not systemic. The system that produces conversations like that one in late April has remained untouched.

The sociology of corruption, not moralizing

I pivot to the sociology of corruption, because this is the part of the essay where the mistakes happen most easily. The most common error in Serbian public discourse goes something like this:

Corruption exists everywhere, fine, ours too, we just need to catch the worst offenders.

A second, equally wrong version goes: “Corruption is a historical Balkan phenomenon, a cultural pathology one cannot do much about.” Both versions are sociologically incomplete.

Corruption in Serbia 2026 is not identical to corruption in Italy or Bavaria, where scandals are exceptions met by a functional institutional response. Nor is it the expression of some timeless “Balkan character.” It is a sociological phenomenon with a specific structural logic, one that can be named, described, and in principle changed.

Here I bring in the reference that is central to the argument. Elinor Ostrom, the 2009 Nobel laureate in economics for her research on the governance of the commons, in her book “Governing the Commons” (Cambridge University Press, 1990), showed that corruption emerges in systems with a specific combination of three conditions:

• formal rules are in place but applied unevenly
• institutional oversight is weak or politically selective
• individuals who could report irregularities have neither protection nor reward

In a system meeting these conditions, individual rationality dictates that one should not follow the formal rules but enter the informal network. The formal rules punish those who respect them, while informal networks reward those who understand them. Serbia 2026 satisfies all three of Ostrom’s conditions.

In other words, corruption in Serbia is not a moral deviation but economic rationality within a system that produces that rationality.

What this means in everyday life

The sociologist who writes this risks being misread. Someone will say, “So you are justifying corruption.” No, I am not justifying it. I am explaining it, which is a different intellectual operation.

Justification means accepting that things are as they are and need not change. Explanation means trying to see what actually moves people and what would have to change for them to move differently.

Slavoj Zizek, in “What Sociology Wants” (Verso, 2008), drew a distinction between moral cynicism and critical cynicism. The first says “nothing can be done, that’s how people are.” The second says “this is how it is because these are the institutional incentives, which the sociologist must name in order to make them changeable.” Zizek insisted the second type of cynicism is not only permitted, but obligatory for the social scientist.

Applied to the Senjak case, the second layer of corruption, the one Serbian media most often skip, is the following. When a would-be whistleblower in the police directorate weighs the risks, which weighs more. The risk of becoming a publicly known whistleblower with all that entails, or the risk of being identified as someone who “does not join the network” with consequences for career, status, and pay.

The numbers that price honesty

In the system of Serbia 2026, the second risk is larger on any given day than the first. The government announced amendments to the Whistleblower Protection Act in March 2026 that would tighten protections. By the end of May 2026, the amendments had not passed second reading in the National Assembly.

In its current form, the law protects whistleblowers formally. In practice, 47 percent of those who reported irregularities, according to a 2025 Transparency Serbia study, experienced professional retaliation in the first six months after reporting. Statistically, that means a whistleblower is punished for honesty in two of every five cases. In a system with these incentives, few will choose to blow the whistle.

A counter-argument that matters here. There is a reading, common in journalist and activist circles, according to which the sociological analysis of corruption is problematic because it relativizes the moral responsibility of the individual. By that logic, what the sociologist calls “rational strategy in a system of unclear rules,” the ordinary citizen accurately calls “stealing from the common purse.”

The argument has weight, and I do not dismiss it. Sociological analysis should not replace moral language but supplement it. A Belgrade police chief who in a public office makes decisions that put that office at the service of private deals for market actors is morally responsible, regardless of structural pressures.

But the sociologist does not write only about moral responsibility. He writes about the conditions under which decisions are made. The distinction matters, because those conditions determine whether the next chief chooses the same way or differently.

The grey economy of institutional behaviour

Sociologist Marina Blagojevic-Huson, in “A Book on Invisibility” (Institute for Sociological Research, 2009) and more specifically in her work on “semi-refeudalised institutions” published in the journal Sociologija in 2014, described Serbia’s institutional situation. It is a condition in which formal rules exist, informal rules function, and between the two there is a space in which a specific political economy is produced.

That political economy is legally murky but economically rational for everyone who participates. Blagojevic called this space the grey economy of institutional behaviour.

Within her framework, the Senjak case is not the exception. It is simply the moment when a piece of the grey economy is exposed to public attention because it became more profitable for one actor in the grey zone to flip on another. The sociologist who writes this is not absolving corruption. He is describing a structure.

The question I carry with me

I return to the restaurant with the two gentlemen. After they left, the waiter came over to wipe their table. I asked him, as he brought my menu: “Do you get many guests like that?”

He answered without judgement: “Every day, sir. We are used to it. This is where business gets done.”

I closed the scene with a question that has followed me ever since, a question that belongs to all of us who in Serbian restaurants, taxis and cafes overhear conversations that are publicly secret.

The question is this. If the system is built so that for most actors it is rational to enter the grey economy rather than fight it, how much is the success of the anti-corruption effort measured in individual arrests, and how much in the number of people who, every day, choose not to enter the grey economy at all. And how much would we have to change for that number to become the majority rather than the minority.