The Challenges of Democratization and Reconciliation in the Post-Yugoslav Space

As part of the Jean Monnet Networks from the Erasmus+Programme, the University of New York Tirana, the University of Dubrovnik, the Sarajevo School of Science and Technology, the European Movement in Serbia, and the Institute for Central-Eastern and Balkan Europe were awarded a three-year project titled Democratization and Reconciliation in the Western Balkans. This consortium of five institutions consist of 20 researchers from diverse academic fields, ranging from political science, international relations, European studies, history, social psychology and communication studies. As part of this project’s deliverables, we are currently working toward finalizing a college textbook focusing on the project’s theme. The book will focus on the challenges societies in the post-Yugoslav space have faced and continue to face in their simultaneous process of democratization, reconciliation and European integration. As such, the book is intended for undergraduate and graduate level students researching or doing course work on democracy, former Yugoslavia, European integration and ethnic reconciliation. The book will be divided into two main sections and each chapter will be written by researchers specializing in a particular area. As such, Section 1 introduces the keywords of the book’s topics: it provides the necessary historical and terminological overview for understanding the contemporary challenges facing the region and addresses the main challenges of democratization and reconciliation; while Section 2 provides a series of controversial aspects that still affect the region helping the reader to grasp the complexity of the challenges and successes which mark the developments in the Western Balkans relations. The textbook adopts an interdisciplinary approach and has the potential for wide market reach. Beyond its regional focus in the Western Balkans, the book has appeal for a wide variety of fields such as democratization as one of the core fields of focus for the book, nationalism and ethnic reconciliation for which the Western Balkans serves as an important case study, and European integration as a highly important process for the region’s foreign policy aspirations. As a genuine interdisciplinary approach to the region’s challenges with democracy and reconciliation, the text may serve as reading material for a variety of college courses. In substantive terms, the book will focus primarily on the republics of the former Yugoslavia, such as Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Kosovo. Furthermore, we think that an e-book publication, with ISBN and DOI, will offer great opportunity to interested people and college students to have an access to the content of this publication. This, of course, does not exclude the possibility to publish a hard copy as well.