This project has received funding via the EUI Widening Programme call 2025. The EUI Widening Europe Programme initiative, backed by contributions from the European Union and EUI Contracting States, is designed to strengthen internationalisation, competitiveness, and quality in research in Widening countries, and thus foster a more cohesive European Higher Education and Research area.
The democratic decline has almost exclusively been studied as the result of unsuccessful democracy promotion, rather than as an outcome of strategic approaches to the global competition for power. The recent victory of Donald Trump in the US Presidential race, Vladimir Putin’s growing ambition to destabilise the EU and the NATO, and the economic rise of Xi Jinping’s China have massive implications on how democracy is understood and practiced by local political actors in the Western Balkan states. The tectonic change in the global geopolitics after Russia’s full-scale invasion on Ukraine in February 2022 thus calls for an urgent investigation of the impact of external actors on democracy and autocracy promotion. The G-Dem research project studies under what conditions do the democratising external actors bring about democratic decline, and when do the autocratic ones have the highest leverage for de-democratisation.
To identify these conditions, and theorise about them, G-Dem develops an innovative analytical framework for studying the geopolitics of democracy. It consists of :
(1) a three-level understanding of external actors’ goals and strategies in different geopolitical contexts (global, regional, local);
(2) a systematisation of the mechanisms of influence (political, economic, cultural); and
(3) a typology of effects on the institutions and values of democracy.
The decoupling of geopolitical actors’ objectives across contexts has an important analytical value, as they entail different strategies, tools, and outcomes. For instance, Russia’s global objective is geopolitical primacy, through territorial expansion. In the Western Balkan region, this strategy takes the shape of providing an alternative to EU integration by leveraging on political and economic dependencies; in individual countries, it ranges from supporting secessionist agendas (Bosnia and Herzegovina), to disinformation campaigns (Kosovo, Serbia), to hybrid threats (Montenegro). Each of these strategies has a different outcome on local democracy: the global one deepens the polarization over values associated with the ‘East’ and the ‘West;’ the regional one cements local oligarchies and their patronage networks, and the local ones challenge the stability of democratic institutions.
To offer a systematic empirical study of the impact of geopolitics on democracy in the Western Balkan states, G-Dem builds up a collaborative research network. Using a bottom-up and context-sensitive approach to research, country experts will provide two types of input:
(a) individual country studies, based on content analysis of government policy and legislative documents, as well as interviews with policymakers and civil society representatives; and
(b) responses to a questionnaire on the political, economic and cultural mechanisms of influence of external actors.
The country reports and questionnaire results will serve as the basis for the comparative cross-regional analysis, which is intended to lay the pillars for a multiannual collaborative research agenda that uses insights from the Western Balkans to reshape the ways we think about the linkages between power, territory, individuals, and institutions.
Website: https://www.eui.eu/research-hub?id=the-geopolitics-of-democracy-in-the-western-balkans
