Bulgaria: Foreign Policy Strategies and Soft Power Potential

SILK ROAD FORUM with Professor Plamen Pantev

Monday, May 4, 2009, 10:00-11:30

Bulgaria is a small country that needs to deal with various asymmetries in its international relations and security policy. Three major strategies guide the country’s foreign policy and security behavior. Apart from traditional hard power, the country has to rely in the future more on its evolving soft power potential – a feature characteristic of the EU, to which Bulgaria belongs.

Prof. Plamen Pantev is the founder and director of the Institute for Security and International Studies (ISIS) and professor at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridsky”. In addition, Prof. Pantev is member of the Specialized Scientific Council in International Relations at the Supreme Testimonial Commission with the Council of Ministers of Bulgaria and acting Co-Chairman of the Study Group on Regional Stability in South East Europe of the NATO/PfP Consortium of the Defense Academies and Security Studies Institutes. Prof. Pantev is author of five books and more than one hundred and twenty academic publications in the fields of international, regional and national security, transatlantic relations, ESDP, theory of international relations and international law, foreign-policy forecasting, Bulgarian foreign and security policy, security issues of the Southeast European and the Black Sea regions, civil-military relations and security sector reform, and international negotiations – in Bulgarian, English, German, Italian, French, Russian and Bahasa.

Location: ISDP, Västra Finnbodavägen 2, Stockholm-Nacka. For a map and directions, please go here.

To attend: RSVP to Ms. Martina Klimesova at mklimesova@isdp.eu