The EU–Balkan Observatory Highlights 2024-2025 offers a panoramic view of a region in transformation, where Europe’s shifting borders, political futures, and social imaginations converge. This volume gathers concise and insightful contributions from researchers and practitioners across Southeast and Central Europe, exploring the complex interplay of democracy, digital culture, ecology, and identity in the contemporary Balkans.

Far from being a mere geographic or transitional space “on its way to Europe,” the Balkans emerges as a laboratory of change, a place where global challenges and local innovations meet. The publication reflects on the region’s entanglement with the European project and the global order, addressing issues such as institutional reform, EU integration and geopolitical realities, memory and populism, youth activism, digital media, and climate policy.

The volume presents a mosaic of perspectives of of institutional maturity, democratic backsliding, and the role of Central and Eastern European states in facilitating EU accession. It calls for “re-arming” civic space in the face of donor withdrawal and hybrid threats, and studies on how digital platforms foster interethnic cooperation and peacebuilding. It also offers fresh perspectives on generation Z protests across the region and new prospects for youth diplomacy, regional solidarity, and civic resistance.

At its heart lies a conviction that the Balkans are not Europe’s unfinished business but its observatory, or a vantage point from which the crises and hopes of Europe’s democratic experiment can be seen most clearly.

The volume is a product of iASK’s interdisciplinary project EU–Balkan Observatory which invites scholars, policy makers and engaged citizens to rethink the region not through stereotypes of instability, but as a space of innovation and resilience.

EU–Balkan Observatory Highlights 2024–2025
Compiled by Jody Jensen and Ivana Stepanović
Published by the Institute of Advanced Studies Kőszeg (iASK)
ISBN 978-615-5742-62-0

Downloadable link: here