CAS SEE Seminars with Guests: Lura Pollozhani

What does it mean to grow up democratic? This report takes the pulse of Generation Z in the Western Balkans with over 6,000 young people surveyed across Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia. The research combines representative surveys with 19 focus group discussions to understand what this generation’s political attitudes reveal about the future of liberal democracy in the region. The findings are both encouraging and sobering: an overwhelming 79.7% believe democracy is the best form of government, outpacing European youth averages, yet most remain disengaged from formal politics not out of apathy but as an informed critique, withholding consent until institutions earn it. Shaped by unfulfilled promises of EU integration, pandemic, and a digital world that individualizes rather than collectivizes, Gen Z holds hybrid values, defies ideological categorization, and is hopeful but conditional. Without reform and delivery, that hope risks becoming what Lauren Berlant has termed cruel optimism. Drawing on Freire’s notion of critical hope and Mouffe’s insistence that liberal-democratic institutions must always be actively defended, Democracy Pulse situates Gen Z not as a passive inheritor of democracy’s unfinished project in the Western Balkans, but as its first authentic product, and perhaps its most revealing test.