The #SecureBlackSea Project Coordination Meeting was held on 16–17 January 2026 in Vienna within the framework of the project Revisiting the Regional Cooperation Structure in the Wider Black Sea: Security Building Through NATO.
The meeting brought together the core project team to review the project’s overall progress and to align analytical and operational components for the next phase. Discussions focused on assessing progress under Milestone 1 and Milestone 2, refining the scope and positioning of the Literature Review, evaluating fieldwork findings from Azerbaijan, Georgia, Bulgaria, and Romania, and preparing the methodological framework for the upcoming scenario-building workshop.
Project team agreed that the project is advancing in line with its timeline and objectives, with the Literature Review, fieldwork, and scenario-building components developing in parallel and reinforcing one another. A key point of discussion was the need to clearly define the purpose, audience, and analytical contribution of the Literature Review to ensure coherence across all project outputs. The meeting emphasized that the Review should remain academically rigorous and policy-relevant, without being prescriptive or explicitly NATO-oriented, while still contributing to a deeper understanding of Black Sea security dynamics.
Fieldwork discussions highlighted both convergences and divergences in threat perceptions, regional identities, and security practices across the four country cases. While Russia emerged as a central reference point in all contexts, the nature of perceived threats varied significantly, underscoring the limits of one-size-fits-all regional cooperation models and reinforcing the importance of critically examining regional ownership and “Black Sea-ness.”
The coordination meeting also marked a major step forward in planning the scenario-building workshop, scheduled for June 2025. Designed as an interactive foresight exercise rather than a conventional academic event, the workshop aims to integrate empirical findings with forward-looking strategic analysis, addressing key uncertainties and drivers shaping the future of Black Sea security.
Overall, the Vienna meeting strengthened analytical coherence across project activities, reaffirmed the balance between academic rigor and policy relevance, and established a clear roadmap for the timely delivery of forthcoming outputs within the NATO SPS framework.