The 1990s wars in Yugoslavia led to the disintegration of the country and ushered an era of poverty, political corruption, organized crime and terrorism. The Balkans became synonymous with the syndrome of a failed state, where civil society institutions are doomed to fail. The area has presented the international community with some unique challenges associated […]
This Working paper studied informal networks and the informal economy in the Balkan region. Special emphasis was placed on Bulgaria and Croatia for the case studies on the role of informal networks in influencing the privatisation process. Bulgaria was also the principal case-study for the survey on factors that function as incentives for firms to […]
This Working paper concentrated on civil society in Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro and FYROM. The IBEU team explored the concept of social capital in order to understand the dividing lines that exist within these societies and the factors that determine these dividing lines. Social capital was studied in terms of trust among population groups […]
This book is about various instances of western decision-making without much thought about the future implications of these decisions on Southeastern Europe. Recognition of the break-away states from Yugoslavia, Greece’s policy vis a vis FYROM in the early nineties and the bombing of FRY in 1999, are three such cases. This author argues that the […]