The historic Prespa Agreement about the name issues between (now) North Macedonia and Greece marked an important turning point for North Macedonian aspirations for NATO membership and the European Union. It also showed that progress in the region is possible with committed and responsible leadership. Other key issues with both country-level and regional consequences, though, remain unresolved: functionality of Bosnia and Herzegovina as a state and the dispute between Kosovo and Serbia over Kosovo's status stand out. Other issues, though, that range from weak rule of law, massive immigration of the younger population and criminal networks that reach highest echelons of the political establishment pose equal challenges with long-term consequences. This seminar will outline some of the key issues that the region (and individual states) has been grappling with as it enters into its fourth post-socialist and post-war decade. It will also provide a discussion about whether we have seen a progress or deterioration in democratisation and peaceful relations in the region and why that might be the case.

Jessie Baerton Hronešová holds a DPhil from Politics and St Antony’s College at the University of Oxford with a thesis on victims’ compensation in Bosnia and Herzegovina. She has worked in international development as a manager and consultant on a variety of projects in post-war countries for Aktis Strategy and other consultancies. Jessie previously worked at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network in Sarajevo and Belgrade. In her research projects she has mostly focused on online sources of extremism and ethno-nationalism, post-war reparations, as well as community-building and transitional justice in the former Yugoslavia. She authored several studies on identity politics (including Post-War Ethno-National Identities of Young People in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2012) and retributive transitional justice in several academic journals (most recent for the Journal of Peacebuilding&Development). Prior to her doctoral studies, Jessie had collaborated with a range of research institutions and consultancies, including the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague.

Adis Merdzanovic is a former postdoctoral Junior Research Fellow at South East European Studies at Oxford (SEESOX) at the European Studies Centre of St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. He obtained his PhD in political science from the University of Zurich and was previously a Swiss Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, D.C. His research focuses on democratisation of divided post-conflict societies with a particular emphasis on political and constitutional orders in the Western Balkans. His Swiss National Science Foundation funded project investigates challenges of liberalism in the Western Balkans in light of the region’s European Union membership perspective. Recently, he published his monograph Democracy by Decree: Prospects and Limits of Imposed Consociational Democracy in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Ibidem, 2015).