Framed by complexity-thinking, this book uses the prism of security sector reform (SSR) to trace the co-evolution of the Western Balkans as part of the EU/Europe security community and the European Union (EU) as a security actor. It aims to analyse the suitability and adaptability of EU security governance to a VUCA world, i.e. a world of increasing vulnerability, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity-the world of transformative change. It takes a detailed view on the transformation of regional and state security in the Western Balkans and the EU's role in the process between 1991, the year that marked the flare-up of violence and large-scale conflict, and 2013, when the first state of the region joined the EU.

Anastasiia Kudlenko is Research Fellow at the Institute for Global Sustainable Development, School for Cross-Faculty Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. Previously, she worked as Post-Doctoral Research Associate for the Oxford Belarus Observatory, UK (2022), the GCRF COMPASS project (2021), and ERC Project Coordinator at SOAS University of London, UK. Anastasiia's research focuses on the EU as a security actor, societal resilience, complexity, security governance and security of Wider Europe, with a special emphasis on Central and Eastern Europe, particularly Ukraine and Belarus, and the Western Balkans. She studied Politics and International Relations in Canterbury, England and Russian and Central Eastern European Studies in Glasgow, Scotland, and Krakow, Poland.