Reuf Bajrovic is a former Minister of Energy in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina government. Previously, he founded and served as president of the Washington-based civic advocacy group, the Emerging Democracies Institute. He founded the Civic Alliance party in Bosnia Herzegovina. Currently, he s working with an independent team of experts to research and analyze Russia's illiberal authoritarian influence in the Western Balkans. He holds an MA in Democracy and Human Rights and an MA in Governance and Policy of European Integration, both from University of Bologna. He holds a BA in political science from University of Louisville.
Dimitar Bechev is a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. He is also a research fellow at the Center of Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the director of the European Policy Institute, a think-tank based in Sofia, Bulgaria. Dr. Bechev has published extensively in both academic and policy format on EU foreign relations, the politics of Turkey and the Balkans, Russian foreign policy, and energy security. His book Rival Power (Yale University Press, 2017) explores Russia’s role in Southeast Europe (Balkans, Greece, Cyprus, and Turkey). He is the author of one book on Macedonia, with another forthcoming in 2019.
Zhikica Pagovski is a partnerships officer at the External Relations Deapartment of the German Marshall Fund, Washington D.C. In this role, he is in charge of fundraising for portfolio of GMF programs and managing the partner/client relations with governments, intergovernmental institutions, corporations, and foundations. Pagovski was a research fellow at Young Professional in Foreign Policy in Washington DC, focusing on issues related with digital technology, big data, and foreign policy. From September 2010 to May 2012, he worked as a consultant for sustainable development at Challenge Future (a start-up think tank based in Slovenia). Pagovski’s former professional experience also includes work at the United Nations and the Government of Macedonia.
Elena Stavrevska is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame. Her work has explored issues of governance and political economy in post-conflict societies, the European Union’s approach to peace- and state-building in the Western Balkans, and interpretive methodologies in peace and conflict studies. She is currently working on her book manuscript that focuses on the framing of justice in peace settlements in general, and in the cases of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Colombia in particular. Dr. Stavrevska has nearly two decades of experience in the civil society sector in the Balkans and actively contributed to the different protest movements in
