State borders have historically served not only as administrative divisions, but also as geostrategic instruments of control and influence. In many cases, in order to create lasting barriers between two political or national spaces, a third ethnicity has been deliberately mediated into border areas. This approach aims to produce persistent tensions, justify political or security interventions, and create zones of long-term pressure.
Such cases are not identical in form, but they follow the same operational principle. Russia has applied this model in Donbas, Crimea, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, while Serbia in northern Kosovo. In all these cases, demography, identity narratives and the border function as intertwined geostrategic levers.
These approaches constitute forms of hybrid warfare, built on long-term preparations rather than random actions. Hybrid warfare, in this sense, has facilitated nationalism’s operational function, transforming it from an ideology into a tool. Demographics, nationalist narrative, and border control constitute a functional trinomial of this strategy.
In this analytical context, the case of the Municipality of Vevcani in North Macedonia should also be seen and celebration me call Serbian national-chauvinist. Vevcan is a municipality with a Macedonian Orthodox majority, administratively separated from Struga in 2004, and is located near the border with Albania, about 8–10 km away, with direct geographical connections to Pogradec and Tirana.
In September 1991, less than two weeks after Macedonia declared independence from Yugoslavia, Vevcani symbolically declared independence through a local referendum. This act was not recognized, but remains indicative of a local tradition of symbolic rebellion.
However, recent developments place Vevcani in a new narrative context. On January 13 and 14, as part of the traditional St. Basil's Carnival, a centuries-old ritual associated with the new year according to the Julian calendar, the singing of the Serbian national-chauvinist song "Ko to kaže, ko to laže, Srbija je mala" was heard.
During the 90s, this song was sung by the Serbian army, police and paramilitary formations during the wars in Kosovo, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Its presence at a traditional festival does not constitute direct evidence of an organized Macedonian state strategy, but functions as an indicator of the penetration of an expansionist narrative into the uncontrolled spaces of North Macedonia.
The case of Vevcani, however, is not an exception. It fits into a chain of events that DOCUMENTARY in the region: graffiti in Kolasin with the message “when the army returns to Kosovo”, inscriptions in Budva such as “Kosovo is Serbia” and “he who dies for Kosovo never dies”, as well as open genocidal calls against Albanians during a basketball game in Kumanovo, including “gas chamber for Albanians” and “clean Macedonia”.
These cases are functioning as social amplifiers of a persistent anti-Albanian narrative, which is spread through graffiti, sports, festivals and cultural rituals. This is characteristic of the psychological and social pressure phase of hybrid warfare, where the goal is not immediate escalation, but the gradual normalization of the discourse of hatred and conflict.
These developments point to a systematic effort to transform anti-Albanianism from an extreme stance into a widespread regional discourse, especially at a time when the Belgrade regime is facing domestic political pressure and international delegitimization. Exporting tension serves as a means of shifting the crisis and testing the limits of regional and international response.
Albanians constitute one of the key geopolitical factors in the Western Balkans that hinders the realization of Russian-Serbian hegemonic projects for strategic access to the Adriatic. For this reason, the normalization of anti-Albanian discourse through hybrid forms should be treated not as a local provocation, but as a direct threat to public order, regional stability and long-term security.
