A year later : war in Ukraine and Western Balkan (geo)politics

Abstract

Russian aggression on Ukraine, started on 24 February 2022, has caused a major swing in global geopolitics. Its symbolic, political, and economic impacts on the Western Balkan states, most of which experienced wars throughout the 1990s, cannot be understated. These impacts are not linear, and political responses to them are at best contradictory. Major political changes are happening across the region, with authoritarian political actors drawing strength or impetus from their association with Russia, or other external actors. The European Union has ostensibly revived its enlargement agenda, but its transformative power has shown significant shortcomings compared to the previous enlargement rounds. The result of this incongruence is little clarity as to how to move ahead, often coupled with mixed messages from the EU to the Western Balkan leaders. This edited collection prizes open the box of these contradictions. One year after the invasion, in this symposium, we reflect on these challenges by gathering insight from 25 scholars, policy makers and civil society representatives from different countries and different subject backgrounds. They all addressed the same question: Has the war in Ukraine profoundly reshaped Western Balkan (geo)politics? In so doing, they provided a multidimensional assessment of the impact of the war in Ukraine as a critical juncture for a European perspective for the Western Balkans.