This paper analyses the drivers of fragility and resilience¹ against the backdrop of the region’s European and Euro Atlantic integration. The latter is of immense importance as efforts to speed up Western Balkans’ EU and NATO membership prospects gained momentum in the last few years. However, these efforts were anything but flawless, facing formidable hurdles arising simultaneously from the complex regional scene and especially the EU’s inconsistent and often ambiguous stance on the Western Balkan enlargement. Therefore, the question guiding this paper is what opportunities and challenges exist for regional resilience.
Understood as both a process and an outcome, resilience is inevitably a multifaceted, internally, and externally driven phenomenon across fields of social action. Grasping its complex nature goes beyond this paper’s scope and it has been thoroughly addressed elsewhere. Therefore, here we only focus on what we believe to be the most pressing drivers of fragility and resilience, closely looking at the EU and NATO enlargement, rival powers’ influence, and regional cooperation. After analyzing the latter drivers, the paper posits a series of recommendations that the EU and local actors may consider in the attempt of building more resilient states and societies. In doing so, special focus is put on Albania, North Macedonia, and Serbia, whose experiences will be compared to that of the other Western Balkan countries – namely Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Montenegro.
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Fostering resilience in the Western Balkans: Opportunities and Challenges