Annual Geopolitical Outlook 2026

The 2026 Annual Geopolitical Outlook is the foundation's first flagship publication. It opens with a synthesis chapter that argues against treating the region as a single story: Southeast Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean are connected by overlapping security architectures, migration flows, and energy infrastructure, but the political tempo of each capital remains national.

The Outlook is organised in three parts. Part one is the synthesis chapter — the foundation's own analytical voice. Part two is the country chapters: fourteen short, structured assessments produced by country leads who are independent of one another and of the foundation. Part three is the cross-cutting series: chapters on energy, migration, judicial reform, and the European Union enlargement process that traverse country borders.

Regional dynamics are not the sum of national headlines. They are the slow accumulation of decisions taken when no headline is being written.

Methodologically, the Outlook commits to three discipline rules. Country leads write to a shared structural template but reach their own conclusions; the foundation does not edit toward a regional consensus. The synthesis chapter is written after the country chapters are locked, and explicitly engages with the points where country leads disagree. Quantitative claims are footnoted to public sources only.

The Outlook is published in March each year. This first edition is intentionally a baseline — the foundation expects the 2027 and 2028 editions to draw their analytical weight from the comparison with prior years, not from the absolute scores in any single edition.