The Balkans are often imagined as a region of explicitly demarcated ethnic and religious divisions, forged through centuries of imperial subjugation, regional rivalry and other such conflicts. Yet nowhere is the complexity behind this more apparent than in the peninsula’s untamed frontiers, where identities have been contested and reshaped by coercion and force.

The seals of the US State Department and Presidency of Kosova sit side-by-side against the backdrop of Skanderbeg Square in Prishtina. There would have been no independent Republic of Kosova without the determined support of the United States; that much is safe to say. Yet even ties this deeply bound, recent years have proven, are not inherently immune from the fluctuations of geopolitical uncertainty. In early September 2025, the US State Department announced  that it had “i

The Balkan states are well-known for the widespread interethnic and interreligious conflict which has characterized the region’s historical and sociopolitical development for centuries. The Albanians deviate from this trend ...