Imagining Democratic Futures: The Western Balkans in 2040

Democracy is facing its most uncertain moment in decades, with global democratic anchors such as the United States and the European Union facing turbulence that weakens alliances and undermines long-standing assumptions about international stability. These shifts are acutely felt in the Western Balkans, a region whose post-conflict democratic trajectory has relied heavily on Euro-Atlantic support, monitoring and integration prospects. As external actors become less predictable, the region faces heightened uncertainty about its democratic trajectory, even as countries diverge in their paths towards the EU. Despite progress, the Western Balkans continues to grapple with unresolved legacies of the 1990s—populism, ethnic tensions, institutional weakness and corruption—and its democratic performance in the Global State of Democracy Indices remains middling. In this context, informal democratic actors such as civil society, grass-roots movements and independent media have become increasingly important, though many depend on support from democracies now facing their own crises. Against this backdrop, International IDEA, supported by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network in Albania, convened a strategic foresight workshop in October 2025 to explore how democracy in the region might evolve by 2040. This discussion paper presents the workshop’s outcomes.