The Roma community in North Macedonia is the most marginalized community that has been dealing with serious problems for decades, from socio-economic problems, all the way through problems with education, discrimination, access to all rights and services, poor living conditions, and what not!? According to the latest census in North Macedonia (2021), the total population is 1,836,713 inhabitants, of which […]

The European Commission recently released its annual progress reports — an ideal moment to pause and reflect on where the Western Balkans stand on their path toward European integration. Despite the title, this text is not written to pin the blame on Brussels. While colonial continuities and paternalistic frameworks do exist in the way the European Union (EU) approaches the […]

Introduction North Macedonia has a unique and complicated relationship with the EU in comparison to other Western Balkans countries. This relationship presents a vulnerability that can be exploited by a host of actors, domestic and foreign, intent on undermining the EU. This mainly relates to the country’s ethnic composition, its fraught relationship with neighbouring Greece and Bulgaria, and the resulting […]

Introduction Gandhi once said: ”There is no path to peace – peace is a path.” This thought resonates strongly in the work of the Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung, the founder of peace studies, who pointed out that peace does not happen spontaneously, but must be rather carefully built over a long period of time. According to Galtung, the so-called positive […]

At the end of May 2025, the Minister for Human and Minority Rights and Social Dialogue in the then newly formed Government of Serbia, Demo Beriša, opened the conference “The Suffering of Roma during the Conflict in Kosovo and Metohija” as the envoy of the Prime Minister of the Republic of Serbia. The Minister stated that we must not forget […]

The European Union’s green transition has opened a new chapter in the relationship between Europe and its peripheries, both within and beyond EU borders, most recently through the EU’s Green Deal which aims for net zero emissions by 2050.[1] Although Bosnia and Herzegovina has formally adopted EU climate regulations and strategies, limited institutional capacity and financial constraints have ensured that […]

The collapse of the Eastern Bloc was celebrated in the West as the triumph of freedom over communism, nurturing the illusion that history had reached its conclusion. Fukuyama’s “end of history” became shorthand for the expectation of a liberal era in which democracy and prosperity would erase old ideological and political divisions.[1] Within this narrative, the wars in Yugoslavia were […]