Since we started to publish The Bridge by March 2019, our homonymous organization had the ambition that this magazine should provide an intellectual platform for other activities. Finally, this happened in Spring 2022: we succeeded to organize Bridge Forum, panel discussions on important issues of the Western Balkans, with the support of Regional Cooperation Council. Thus, we started with two panel discussions online, each of them with two panellists and a moderator, who was the editor in chief of this journal. The topics of the first panel was that of economic problems of youth in the Western Balkans, and the topic of the second was that of brain draining. The public was also young people from the region, with whom the panellists had a dialogue after the respective presentations. For providing participants in these discussions and for the dissemination of the publication of the panels through social media and video sharing platforms we had the very valuable help from AIESEC (Association internationale des étudiants en sciences économiques et commerce), an organization cherishing “a dream of building cross-cultural understanding across nations”. The discussions had thousands of followers across the region.
Later in Autumn, the project had a continuity through Bridge Forum 2, mainly with the funding generously accorded by the Agency for the Support of Civil Society. There were three panel discussions and the format was the same, with the difference that the second panel was not online, but on-site, as the space was offered to us by the Center for Openness and Dialogue, Tirana, which also partially financed this panel.
Bridge Forum 2 was focused on youth in the Western Balkans and the public was again compound of young people, mostly students, and in this respect the contribution from AIESEC was crucial. The first panel, which took place last October, was dedicated to the importance of the civil society for the quality of democracy; the second one, which took place in December, was dedicated to the processes of integration, both regional and European; and the third one, which took place in January 2023, was dedicated to youth activism for the protection of environment. We are publishing all the six presentations of Bridge Forum 2 in the dossier of this issue of our magazine.
