Join us at the public event tackling the Russian economic footprint in the Western Balkans to find out more about the Centre of International Private Enterprise's latest research outcomes.

Over the past decade, Russia and a number of other countries have sought to play a larger role in the Western Balkans. The tools that these countries have used are not new, but the extent of their involvement certainly is. These include not only instruments of soft power, such as cultural, religious and media campaigns, but increasingly also, in the case of Russia in particular, economic interventions.

To address the challenge, Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) launched a project to pioneer a new methodology to quantify Russia’s economic presence in the Balkans, with a particular focus on the issue of corrosive capital, analyzing how this capital interacts with local governance. This is the first time that foreign economic engagement in the Balkans has been studied in such a comprehensive manner. A series of upcoming reports written by CIPE partners, including the Sofia-based think tank Center for the Study of Democracy and a network of local experts in Montenegro, Serbia, Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, will show how governance gaps create opportunities for the inflow of corrosive capital, and how such capital exacerbates these governance gaps.