On May 5, 2023, I was interviewed by the Irish Times on the topic of recent mass shootings in Serbia:
“The notion of killing people in a random manner in public is imported into Europe and has culturally diffused,” said Alexei Anisin, dean of the School of International Relations and Diplomacy of the Prague-based Anglo-American University. “Unfortunately, I think that every case contributes,” he continued. “It’s definitely becoming embedded.”
In his 2021 book, Mass Shootings in Central and Eastern Europe, Anisin wrote that mass shootings in the region were an understudied phenomenon and warned of risk factors due to societal fragmentation following the collapse of communism and cultural influences from the US via the internet. In three decades, there were 76 successful or attempted mass shootings in the countries that previously made up the Soviet Union, research for the book found, many of them previously unrecorded in English. “Some of these mass shooters in Central and Eastern Europe literally copied American mass shooters. It’s observable through how they dressed and the way that they planned their attacks,” Anisin said.