Mr Oleksandr HLEBA, Senior Academic Assistant in the European Interdisciplinary Studies Department, 
has taken part over the last months in two international conferences revolving around European Studies in general and the EU's Enlargement Policy in particular.
Continuing his research on the EU integration of the Western Balkans, on 11 September 2020, Mr HLEBA participated in the virtual conference organized by the University Association for Contemporary European Studies (UACES) and presented a paper on The EU and the Western Balkans: Navigating through the ‘Perfect Enlargement Storm’, in which he analysed the challenges of the ongoing EU integration of the Western Balkans by looking at the actors involved and the applicable enlargement methodology, simultaneously contrasting it to the process whereby Central and Eastern European countries joined the EU in 2004, 2007 and 2013.
On 15 October 2020, Mr HLEBA was among the participants of the conference on The future of EU enlargement and partnership policies: EU actorness in South-Eastern Europe and the Eastern Neighbourhood, co-organized by a consortium of universities, including the University of the Peloponnese (Greece), the University of Canterbury (New Zealand), and the University of Graz (Austria). Mr HLEBA delivered a presentation entitled The revised methodology of the EU’s enlargement policy: Old wine in new bottles?, where he discussed the EU’s latest decision to amend the methodology of the accession process and what repercussions, if any, it would have on the Western Balkans’ EU integration.