Volume 73, Issue 4

This article explores antigender mobilisation – a global phenomenon that challenges and undermines gender equality – with a focus on Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). Using a political process model of social movements, it examines antigender activities and tactics within broader social, institutional, and political contexts. Drawing on qualitative interviews and focus groups with activists, journalists, and other professionals with lived experience, the study highlights how narratives centred on tradition and family values intersect with wartime legacies, ethnic divisions, prevailing conservativism, political conditions, and international influences. In the Republika Srpska entity, such campaigns have been supported by the state and systematically coordinated, posing serious threats to women’s and LGBTQ+ rights. Elsewhere in BiH, antigender rhetoric persists but remains more fragmented. The findings demonstrate how local dynamics intersect with transnational trends, revealing the mechanisms by which antigender mobilisation undermines gender equality in a postconflict setting.

The article applies Jessop’s and Hay’s strategic–relational approach to the European Union’s enlargement policy. Focusing on the leaders of applicant countries, the authors argue that these are reflexive actors, who may break the confines of the structurally determined compliance/non-compliance binary choice in European Union (EU) accession negotiations and explore additional policy options. In the Western Balkans, governing elites have repeatedly attempted to make the European Union dilute its accession conditions by presenting the EU institutions with their preferred policy dilemmas. The authors term this practice “reversed conditionality”. The article examines two cases of reversed conditionality: Serbia’s alliance with Russia and the threat of unification of Albania and Kosovo. With these case studies, the authors provide a comparative assessment of the effects of such practice for both its initiators and the EU’s enlargement policy.

This article examines Greece’s evolving role within the European Union’s (EU’s) maritime security architecture from 2008 to 2025. While existing scholarship has predominantly framed Greek security and defence policy through the lens of its historical rivalry with Türkiye and a defensive posture focused on the Eastern Mediterranean, this research demonstrates a broader and more dynamic engagement in EU-led naval missions. Through an empirical analysis of Greece’s participation in all four EU Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) maritime missions, as well as its contribution to the formulation of the 2014 EU Maritime Security Strategy (EUMSS), the author challenges prevailing interpretations of Greece as a reactive and regionally confined actor. The article contributes to both academic and policy debates by reinterpreting Greek security and defence policies and strategic thinking within broader European frameworks and offering new insights into the role of medium-sized EU member states in shaping CSDP maritime security.

This study examines the relationship between digital and traditional finance-related poverty reduction, including the moderating role of EU membership in 18 countries (2004–2021) by using panel data regression models. The findings indicate that the dominant method of poverty reduction through banking institutions remain traditional financial inclusion instruments, such as bank accounts and bank branches, while digital financial channels have not yet fully realized their potential. European Union membership has generated different poverty and inclusion outcomes as it has strengthened traditional banking while impacting digital financial access. The study provides valuable insights for policy interventions, showing how traditional banking structures and digital financial solutions might play vital roles in addressing different levels of poverty. The expansion of financial access requires an improved internet banking infrastructure, especially in EU candidate countries, as well as methods of tackling e-commerce adoption barriers that benefit disadvantaged populations through digital trade.

Jasmila Žbanić’s film Blum: Masters of Their Own Destiny (2024) revisits one of socialist Yugoslavia’s most emblematic enterprises, Energoinvest, through the life and vision of its founder Emerik Blum. The film intertwines industrial history, personal testimony, and collective memory to explore the worker self-management experiment in Yugoslavia, and specifically Bosnia-Herzegovina, including its enduring moral and political legacies. This essay situates Žbanić’s documentary within the historiography of Yugoslav socialism and the wider debates about postsocialist memory and economic imagination. It argues that the film functions both as an act of historical recovery and as a meditation on the failure of an economic utopia – offering a layered account of modernity, ownership, and belonging that challenges neoliberal narratives of progress.