This book is the result of an Advanced Research Workshop organized by the Centre for European Security Studies at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, and the Centre for SouthEast European Studies, Bulgaria, with a grant from the NATO Programme for Security Through Science.

Held in Bansko, Bulgaria in April 2006, the workshop set out to explore possible ways to promote security cooperation in the Wider Black Sea Area. The area holds major importance for Euro-Atlantic security. Strategically located at the crossroads of Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia, the region, after the dual NATO-EU enlargement in 2004–2007, became part of the periphery of the common Euro-Atlantic security system, with critical value for European energy security and the war on terrorism.

The region faces a variety of security challenges, including regional conflicts, ethnic strife, terrorism, and powerful organized crime, while many of the countries have weak institutions, turbulent political systems, unstable economies and lack of democracy. In addition, the traffic of drugs to the West, the steady stream of militancy from the Middle East, and the energy lines from the oil and gas-rich regions of the East to an energy-hungry Europe gradually define the Wider Black Sea Area as a region urgently requiring political attention and investment in its security.

However, the Wider Black Sea Area has long been a neglected security area. The current Euro-Atlantic attempts to address security issues in the Wider Black Sea Area are relatively limited and focused on the intergovernmental level of interaction. NATO's Partnership for Peace and the EU's European Neighborhood Policy provide a general framework for addressing, among other things, some broadly defined security issues while the countries in the region participate in multilateral and regional security initiatives, including the Black Sea Force for search and rescue operations. Unlike the security cooperation in the Balkans and Eastern Europe, however, regional security cooperation and dialogue in the Wider Black Sea Area have been complicated by lingering disputes and the lack of common foreign policy priorities, namely integration in the EU and NATO. Thus, despite facing common challenges, the countries in the region find it hard to agree on common policies addressing common security challenges.

The goal of the workshop was to discuss the possibilities for a bottom-up approach to designing common policies addressing security challenges in the region. The resulting book is intended to provide fresh ideas on the possible areas of security cooperation, even as the authors agreed that comprehensive, far-reaching policies are hard to attain in the near future.

Peter M.E. Volten and Blagovest Tashev