Future Threats to EU Candidate Countries: The REUNIR Strategic Foresight Approach

Democratic countries in the Western Balkans and the European Union’s Eastern Neighborhood are on a trajectory to EU accession. But major powers like Russia seek to undermine democratic resilience and progress toward EU membership through military aggression and malign influence operations. The European Union needs adequate policy instruments to support candidate countries against these threats in the future.

This working paper describes the strategic foresight methodology applied in the REUNIR research project to assess current and anticipate future threats to EU candidate countries – whether they be military, political or socio-economic – and make the EU’s foreign, neighborhood and enlargement policy toolkits more robust to support these countries’ resilience. The methodology combines scenario-based foresight and forecasting to identify, assess, prioritize, and address both the calculable risks and radical uncertainties emerging from foreign malign influencing and to design strategic policy options for the EU.

For more details, download the full paper here.

More information on REUNIR can be found here and at the project website.

The project is funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation program under grant agreement no. 101132446.