Researching corruption scandals in Serbia: New approaches and challenges

This research is motivated by the striking gap between the ever increasing number of corruption scandals in Serbian politics and the lack of academic research on this topic. The article, firstly, presents an overview of the theoretical approaches, conceptualisations and definitions of scandals in scholarly literature. The second part of the study outlines preliminary findings based on 25 interviews conducted with Serbian state officials, academics and members of the NGO sector between 2012 and 2013. The findings indicate that two types of scandals can be differentiated in Serbian public discourse on corruption - afera and mafija. The author suggests that researchers of corruption scandals in Serbia can benefit from the wide variety of the existing theoretical approaches and the large number of case studies that Serbian media are offering