Security, Resilience & Geopolitics

Lead: KCSS (Kosovo) Co-Lead: BCSP (Serbia)

Security has become a defining frame of EU enlargement, shaped by the war in Ukraine, hybrid warfare, and the erosion of rule-of-law structures across parts of the region. This group's central move is to treat the region's internal condition as a security problem in its own right: democratic backsliding, state capture, and shrinking civic space are security risks, and the causality runs inside-out, with external actors exploiting existing corruption, weak rule of law, and captured media rather than manufacturing instability. The remedy is therefore resilience, not just deterrence. On that logic the group folds rule of law and anti-corruption into a single security agenda, and turns the Western Balkans' role as a contributor to European security from slogan into named mechanisms – FDI screening, beneficial-ownership registries, EPPO cooperation, and entry points into EU rule-of-law and democratic-resilience structures. It also addresses hybrid threats such as disinformation, election interference, and critical infrastructure attacks, illicit financial flows, and the role of civil society in security oversight and accountability.