The International Security Institute (ISI)
The International Security Institute (ISI)
We are independent of governments, political parties, and ideological agendas.
About the International Security Institute
The International Security Institute (ISI) was established in Belgrade in 2002, at a moment when the world was still counting the dead from September 11 and Southeast Europe was still counting the cost of its own wars. The timing was not coincidental. It was a recognition that the post-Cold War order had not delivered peace; it had only rearranged the conditions for new conflicts.
For over two decades, ISI has operated on a single, uncompromising premise: independent analysis is not a luxury but a prerequisite for informed decision-making in politics, security, and public life. We do not produce analysis to confirm what those in power wish to hear. We produce it to describe what is actually happening, however inconvenient that may be.
Our work spans the full range of contemporary security: military conflict and hybrid warfare, information operations, the erosion of democratic institutions, and the geopolitics of emerging technologies. We monitor the transformation of alliances, the weaponisation of energy and migration, and the slow institutional decay that leaves societies exposed long before the first shot is fired. We also track the economic dimensions of security – sanctions regimes, investment risk, supply chain vulnerabilities, and the political conditions that determine whether markets remain open or close overnight.
Independent Strategic Analysis in a Contested Global and Regional Environment
ISI brings together experts from universities, diplomacy, intelligence and security structures, law, economics, and media. Our geographic focus is Southeast Europe and the Western Balkans, a region that has historically served as both a testing ground for external influence and a fault line between competing visions of the international order. But our work does not stop at regional borders. The crises that begin in Kyiv, Washington, or Tehran arrive in the Balkans sooner or later. We track them from the beginning.
We are independent of governments, political parties, and ideological agendas. We accept no brief that compromises the integrity of our work. Governments, corporations, financial institutions, and international organisations engage ISI when they need analysis and assessments that are reliable, confidential, and free from political interference. In an era when manipulation of perception has become an instrument of power, wielded by states, corporations, and political movements alike, and when the boundary between information and propaganda is deliberately erased, that independence is not merely a principle. It is what makes our work worth commissioning.