Reiner Osbild and Will Bartlett (Eds.), Western Balkan Economies in Transition: Recent Economic and Social Developments. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2019 (Societies and Political Orders in Transition series). xii + 171 pp. Hardcover ISBN 978-3-319-93664-2; eBook ISBN 978-3-319-93665-9

The Western Balkans occupy an unusual place in the European imagination. As Reiner Osbild and Will Bartlett observe in their introduction, the region tends to attract international attention chiefly in moments of crisis, the wars of Yugoslav succession in the 1990s, or the migration flows of 2015, while the patient, often frustrating work of economic and institutional convergence with the European Union goes largely unremarked. This edited volume sets out to correct that imbalance. Bringing together twelve contributions, several of which originated at a 2016 conference held at the University of Applied Sciences Emden-Leer, the book offers a measured, empirically grounded survey of the economic and social challenges confronting Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia as they pursue accession to the EU.