Southeast & Eastern Europe

Founded in 2021, the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, Tirana Office, works to build and expand democratic, accessible and diverse public spaces in urban as well as rural areas in Albania.

After Armenia's defeat in the war in Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020, foreign and security policy developments in the small South Caucasian republic are happening at an unprecedented pace.

The short documentary film “Kapitän Wakusch” or in english: “Captain Wakusch” is a poetical portrait of the German-Georgian writer and philosopher Giwi Margwelashvili born in 1927 in Berlin, died 2020 in Tbilisi. A permanent stranger and migrant between Germany and Georgia, East and West, reality and literature. 

The need for practitioners and history promoters to do historical work “beyond the walls of the traditional classroom” is constantly growing. One of the main takeaways from our recent study trip to Berlin is that public and open discussions about the past and remembering are crucial for building future welfare.

Georgia and the EU are standing at a historic crossroads. Which factors affect their abilities to bring the membership bid on track, and what should the EU’s response look like?

On April 28, Montenegro got a new, minority Government. Prime Minister Dritan Abazović’s cabinet, however, is one of the largest in the country’s recent, three-decades long history of multi-party democracy.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine will bring flashbacks to millions of people in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Kosovo, who have all suffered massively under the regime of Serbian dictator Slobodan Milošević. In April 1992, Serb nationalists waged a war on my home country under a similar pretext as Putin did with Ukraine, denying its statehood, history, and national identity. Today, Bosnia and Herzegovina is in the worst crisis since the end of the war.

Democratic values and principles have been under fire in Bosnia and Herzegovina for years, from within and without, a battle between ethnocracy and democracy is being waged in the country at the expense of its citizens.

Not a dormant ethno-national conflict is the main problem in Bosnia. Rather, the source of crises since 1995 lies in the state’s weakness as well as a political class prone to corruption, nepotism, and abuse of power in the name of ill-defined ethnic interests. Is the Russian aggression on Ukraine a wake-up call for US and EU’s engagement in Bosnia?

The largest refugee movement since the Second World War now requires coordination throughout Europe.