Brief: Security Cooperation Frameworks in Southeast Europe
An inventory of the overlapping bilateral, regional and alliance-level arrangements currently in force, and where they conflict.
Southeast Europe hosts an unusually dense set of security arrangements: alliance commitments, EU frameworks, regional initiatives and a thick layer of bilateral agreements, many of which predate the others.
Overlap and friction
Overlap is not in itself a problem. Friction arises where arrangements imply different reporting lines, different interoperability standards or different thresholds for activation — and where no mechanism exists to reconcile them.
This brief inventories the arrangements currently in force, identifies the three areas where obligations conflict in practice, and sets out what a deconfliction mechanism would need to do.