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.
Democratic decline in the Western Balkans 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.
This project leverages an expert network covering all six Western Balkan states and a transnational Advisory Board, to bond the disconnected democratisation and geopolitics research agendas. In so doing, G-Dem offers a multilayered contribution, which is substantively both conceptual and empirical, and methodologically interdisciplinary, collaborative, and context-sensitive.
The project feeds into the activities of the Southeastern Europe: Transitions, Prospects, Crossroads Research Area of the Global Governance Programme at the EUI's Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies.
For more information about the EUI Widening Europe Programme, please visit the official webpage.