South East Europe Research Network (SEERN)

The South East Europe (SEE) region is broadly understood as covering areas of Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Kosovo, Moldova, North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, and Turkey. With Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine redrawing Europe’s security landscape, the European Union intensifying debate on the future of enlargement and flexible forms of association, migration corridors threading through SEE in both directions, and the semi-peripheral character of the region’s economies in the context of heightened ‘great-power’ competition, SEE sits at the crossroads of the continent’s most urgent geopolitical, economic, and social transformations.

The South East Europe Research Network (SEERN) aims to build a pan-GW4 research community that encourages interdisciplinary dialogue about legal, political, socioeconomic, and historical matters concerning this region. The network will provide mutual support to colleagues to more effectively integrate existing and co-create new SEE perspectives, knowledge and experiences into theoretical work, empirical research, and teaching of a range of social sciences and humanities disciplines. Despite the wealth of expertise scattered across the GW4 alliance, there is at present no formal mechanism for regular exchanges of ideas, co-creation of new research agendas, or collaborative approaches to external funding opportunities focused on this region. This Development Award project will therefore play a vital role in setting up dialogues and spaces where GW4 can move to the forefront of research and teaching in this area.

SEERN will use the Development Award to convene a one-day workshop and a public-facing event in Bristol in December 2025. For the workshop, an open call will go out to all colleagues at Bath, Bristol, Cardiff, and Exeter working on and in SEE. The main objectives will be to build connections, identify common research interests, explore new interdisciplinary avenues, and begin shaping collaborative projects that can attract external support. For the public-facing event, a roundtable will be held about South East Europe as a knowledge producer in world politics, to which representatives from government and the foreign office will also be invited. By engaging directly with non-academic audience, we aim to highlight the societal relevance of advanced scholarship on and with South East Europe, laying the groundwork for future knowledge-exchange activities.