In Serbia, 2025 was the year when protesting students rejected collaboration with the country’s civil society NGOs - but at what cost? Twenty-one-year-old Jovana Pongracic is a third-year student of ...

Nadia and the Securitate, by Romanian historian Stejarel Olaru, is a meticulous and ballyhoo-free reconstruction of the ordeal the teenager experienced at home while awards and accolades poured in ...

People across Serbia have lost their jobs after supporting student-led protests against the ruling Serbian Progressive Party, or for refusing to attend government-backed counter-rallies. For 16 years, ...

Armed drones are becoming a favoured means for Balkan countries to boost their military muscle and regional clout – but even though they are unlikely to trigger a war, their unchecked spread brings ...

Croatia is still searching for 1,740 victims of the 1991-95 war, many of them from the wartime flashpoint town of Vukovar, where the funeral this year of one of the town's defenders drew thousands of ...

Between 2023 and 2024, the value of Serbian arms sales to Israel soared from 1.4 million euros to 42.3 million, unaffected by widespread allegations of Israeli war crimes in Gaza. Serbian arms exports ...

Companies in Bosnia are developing drones that could potentially be used by the country’s military, BIRN can reveal, even as Sarajevo buys six discounted Bayraktar drones from Turkey. In early July, ...

Despite political tensions sparked by high-profile corruption cases, Klodjan Braho tells BIRN that his main priority will be to guarantee Albanians that “no one is above the law”. Supporters of the ...

Albania’s communist regime outlawed religion and waged a decades-long campaign of repression against Christian and Muslim believers, jailing and executing clerics and persecuting their families - but ...

In the first of a four-part series examining the legacy of independent Croatia’s first president, who died 25 years ago, BIRN looks at how Franjo Tudjman built a personality cult and extended his ...

A wild river given protection as a ‘national park’ in 2023 still faces serious threats to its biodiversity from pollution – and Albania’s government is doing little to stop it. Only a few metres ...

Enver Hoxha’s dictatorial Communist regime ruled using mass surveillance, but only now are some Albanians seeing their files and discovering that friends and relatives informed on them to the powerful ...