RE-ORDERING THE BALKANS

University of Cambridge

The Balkans has long been Europe’s most unstable region. After a series of devastating conflicts in the 1990s, the Balkans was pacified when the US intervened militarily to impose a settlement which transformed the internal boundaries from Yugoslavia into international borders, resulting in a set of multiethnic states such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia and Kosovo. However, this settlement has been consistently challenged by the peoples of the region who believe the security, rights and opportunity they desire can only be attained by establishing nation states, based on the established model in the rest of Europe. For the last year, Serbia and Kosovo’s leaders have been openly discussing an exchange of territory along ethnic lines, with the apparent approval of the United States and the European Union. Meanwhile, Albania and Kosovo have stated their intention to unify next decade and the Serbs and Croats in Bosnia are driving the country towards disintegration. In this presentation, PhD student Timothy Less will ask how long its current borders can hold, what the map of the region will look like in the future, and whether the region make a transition to nation statehood without another conflict, and what the response of the outside powers should be.