The following analysis is part of Global Guardian's 2025 Global Risk Assessment and Geostrategic Stress Index (GSI), a predictive model that shows what countries are most likely to undergo a polycrisis in the next five years driven by geostrategic concerns. For more information, download and explore the 2025 Global Risk Map.
Current Situation
On 01 September 2024, NATO increased its peacekeeping force presence in Mitrovica, home to a key bridge where conflicts between ethnic Albanians and ethnic Serbs typically ignite.
The Serbo-Kosovar conflict is a perennial source of instability in Southeastern Europe. Roughly 90% of Kosovars are ethnically Albanian, but a minority population of ethnic Serb separatists in the north seek to reunify with Serbia. Serbia does not recognize Kosovo’s independence and routinely provokes civil unrest, attacks on peacekeepers, and recently, an armed attack by a paramilitary on Kosovar police. Kosovo relies almost wholly on NATO to deter its more powerful neighbor. Serbia – unwilling to relinquish its claim on Kosovo and unable to defeat NATO militarily – has resorted to a Russian-styled (and assisted) gray zone campaign of support for the Kosovar Serb minority agitation. The tiny area of Mitrovica, where most of the Kosovar Serbs are concentrated, is thus one of the most significant friction points between the Russian and NATO blocs.
History
Kosovo was a province of Serbia until it gained independence in 2008. Kosovo spent more than a century under Belgrade’s rule between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 21st century. In the mid-1990s, Yugoslavia began to fracture under the strain of multiple crises. Ethnic enmity and nationalism, which had previously been harshly suppressed, began to take root as national politicians sought to aggrandize their own power at the expense of the federal communist authority. Slobodan Milosevic, then-president of Serbia, used ethnic tension between Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo to gain national prominence and undercut the president of Yugoslavia in much the same way Yeltsin used his position as president of the Russian Federation to undercut Gorbachev’s Soviet authority. Yugoslavia dissolved in a civil war fraught with ethnic cleansing and war crimes.
While the constituent Yugoslav republics all gained independence, Kosovo’s status as an autonomous province with Serbia continued. Kosovar separatists agitated both politically and militarily for full sovereignty, leading to a Serbian military incursion and ethnic cleansing. Direct fighting only ended after NATO intervention through a bombing campaign in 1999. The conflict inculcated a set of nested majority-minority relationships. The Serbs in northern Kosovo feel threatened by the ethnic Albanian majority, who in turn are threatened by Serbia, which NATO surrounds.
Threat Vectors
- NATO sees preserving Kosovar independence as essential to its European legitimacy. If NATO interventions can be undone, other beneficiaries of NATO’s defense umbrella may question their reliance on the alliance and Russia may see an opportunity to expand its influence westward.
- Russia is looking for any opportunity to sow disunity in NATO between the United States and the Europeans. The Balkans are an attractive theater for Russian agitation because of the region’s reputation for intractable conflicts and Serbia’s traditional friendship with Russia.
- Serbian and Kosovar politicians can score easy points by taking a hard line on ethnic minority populations. In Serbia, the nationalist government has used Kosovo as a method of first resort when faced with criticism for rigging municipal elections, accusations of corruption, or protests against environmental exploitation.
Industry Impact
Serbia’s main point of global market impact is a prospective lithium mine in the Jadar Valley, 200 kilometers west of Belgrade. President Vucic has highlighted the mine, which is to be operated by Rio Tinto, as a major component of Serbia’s economic development and Europe’s move to clean energy. The mine would supply roughly 90% of Europe’s lithium needs, but energetic environmentalist opposition has held up progress on the mine for years.
In 2022, protesters successfully shut down large parts of the country in protest and stated outright opposition to any level of mining. Serbia is also a significant producer of industrial manufacturing components that supplies major industrial centers throughout Europe, including Germany. Even a small increase in component prices could have a serious impact on the European manufacturing sector given recent rises in energy prices and the loss of the Russian market.
OutLook
- If Vucic comes under sufficient domestic pressure, it is probable that he would invoke nationalist sentiment surrounding Kosovo in order to deflect attention and to create the conditions to paint his opposition as illegitimate, foreign-backed, and anti-Serbian. This could quickly lead to a violent confrontation between NATO forces and/or NATO-backed Kosovar security forces and Serbian-backed forces with some element of plausible deniability along a Russian “little green men” or Wagner group model.
- A potential conflict between Serbian-backed forces and NATO or Kosovar security would likely have serious repercussions in other countries in the region, principally in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but also in North Macedonia and Montenegro.
Global Guardian's annual Risk Map displays country-specific security risk levels based on a series of indicators including crime, health, natural disasters, infrastructure, political stability, civil unrest, and terrorism.
This year's addition, the Geostrategic Stress Index (GSI), attributes a low to extreme categorical risk rating that forecasts the likelihood of a local crisis taking on regional or global dimensions as countries navigate new cold war relations.
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