Sustainability of the Status Quo and Inviolability of the Balkan State Borders Conflict Prevention or Prolonging of the Instability in the Region

Kirkovski, Dimitar and Rajkovcevski, Rade (2013) Sustainability of the Status Quo and Inviolability of the Balkan State Borders Conflict Prevention or Prolonging of the Instability in the Region. In: The Balkans Between Past and Future: Security, Conflict Resolution and Euro-Atlantic Integration. Faculty of Security-Skopje, Skopje, Macedonia, pp. 26-38. ISBN 978-608-4532-36-1

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Abstract

The conflict prevention has an emphasized significance within contemporary international community. It has its beginnings in the multilateral diplomatic initiatives and other legal arrangements taken many centuries ago at interstate level in order to reduce the range of violence and the occurrence of war. For centuries the states and regions continue to live in the ancient cycle of creation, existence, but with a different final outcome: destruction, accession to an existing or a new union, and finally disintegration.
The 1990s showed the vulnerability of the whole world to respond to the violence as a result of the changes in the world’s international system structure and the dissolution of the Soviet Union and SFR Yugoslavia (SFRY). Thus, a new era of conflict prevention emerged: from interstate into intrastate conflict prevention. The Balkan region, often identified with the Balkan Peninsula, was an area of different types of conflicts, ones not only a consequence and continuation of the latent or visible clash of the Superpowers but also as eruptions of a different kind of nature. Most of the conflicts were rooted way back before the creation of SFRY after the Second World War. In the Balkans, conflict prevention as a process failed because of the speed of the events which lead to the creation and further development of the intrastate conflict prevention mechanisms. At the aftermath, several newly constituted states appeared, one of them still not fully recognized in the international community. The newly constituted states now have boundaries which divide and connect them simultaneously.
Most of the conflicts in the region were and still are motivated by one reason - the desire for unification of territory in which the people of one ethnicity live. The current borders leave the same possibilities that endanger the integrity and existence of the states, and an opportunity for the gap or the crack to be exploited.
This paper defines the geographical and temporal scope of conflicts in the region and focuses on the conflict prevention as a holistic systematic approach. It describes the conflicts in the Balkan region since 1990’s and makes a classification of the conflicts by intensity and type. Also, by identifying the conflict prevention mechanisms, paper presents the current ongoing processes in the region, simultaneously depicting the current evident, latent, or possible conflicts. The main outcomes are deducted and a prediction of security in the region is presented: binding or separating state borders?
The methodological aspects of the paper are based on analysis of content of documents and experiences and comparative analysis of qualitative and quantitative data.

Key words: Balkans, conflict prevention, security, mechanism, borders, instability

Item Type:	Book Section
Subjects:	Scientific Fields (Frascati) > Social Sciences > Political science
Divisions:	Faculty of Security
Depositing User:	Prof. Dr. Rade Rajkovchevski
Date Deposited:	27 Oct 2022 10:29
Last Modified:	13 Nov 2022 12:09
URI:	https://eprints.uklo.edu.mk/id/eprint/7277

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