Democracy and Human Rights

If the country goes through profound systemic changes in the political, economic and ideological sense, its dependence on an international environment can intensify considerably. This is exactly what happened in almost all post-communist states, 25 years ago. The need for internationally established models in systems that have recently introduced the development of a political pluralism and democracy as well as solutions to a functional one, and a general opening of society that goes along with the ideal of freedom, has opened the door to external influences. The articles in this issue of the Perspetcives magazine tell different stories about the current challenges of international interventions in Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia and Serbia.

Universities often teach yesterday’s skills by inertia and their teachers are still compensated generously from the taxpayers’ purse. We live in dynamic times where great syllabi may not be relevant by the time the first graduates that come out of the assembly line. As difficult as it seems, universities should strive to imbue graduates with the skills which will serve them for 40 years of their careers.

Women’s bodies have regularly been – and still are – the central target of conservative and fundamentalist ideology and praxis. Although the individual right to self-determination has always been shaped by social and cultural norms and legal frameworks, it is currently being determined more than ever by reproductive technologies and medical issues. This essay provides analytical background information for critical and controversial debates, continues the politicisation of seemingly personal issues, aims to open space for the clarification of positions and provide motivation to explore political intervention.  

Over the course of 2015, an estimated 1.5 million people – the bulk of them refugees from Syria – made their way from Greece to Western Europe via the Balkan route. The shift to this previously marginal route for irregular entry of refugees and migrants into the EU led to the collapse of the EU’s external border in the Aegean and turned the long-standing problem of the EU’s deficient common asylum policy, which disproportionately affected the southern member states, into a full-fledged crisis.