Non-Traditional Security Challenges as a Main Security Threat to the Western Balkan Countries

Some of the biggest challenges states in the Western Balkans are facing since the end of the Cold War are non-traditional security threats. Although recent studies have argued that “history has returned” and that traditional security threats have come back to become core challenges for states, authors of this paper argue that due to geopolitical, political, economic and cultural factors, the states in the region suffer more from non-traditional or “soft security” rather than “hard security” threats. In this paper, the authors are focused on two of such threats: organized crime and terrorism. The region of the Western Balkans is quite vague and imprecise as a concept, and for the purpose of this paper, we use the term to refer to the former Yugoslavia, excluding Slovenia and Croatia and including Albania. Two methodological approaches are used: discourse analysis and semi- structured interviews. The paper consists of three parts. The first part deals with the theoretical and conceptual change of security in the Western Balkans by focusing on key security challenges which the states are facing. In the second part, the paper identifies main contemporary threats, focusing on two most significant threats: transnational organized crime and terrorism. In the third part, the paper analyses alternative approaches that these states can use to overcome these security threats