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Secessionist de facto states, by their very nature, sit outside of the international system. Having unilaterally declared independence from their parent state, they are invariably prevented from joining the United Nations, and thus taking their place as members of the community of universally recognised countries. While the reasons for such punitive approaches have a logic according to prevailing political and legal approaches to secession, it is also recognised that isolation can have harmful effects. Ostracising de facto can not only hinder efforts to resolve the dispute by reducing their willingness to engage in what they see as an asymmetrical settlement process, it can also force them into a closer relationship with a patron state. For this reason, there has been growing interest in academic and policy circles around the concept of engagement without recognition. This is a mechanism that provides for varying degrees of interaction with de facto states while maintaining the position that they are not regarded as independent sovereign actors in the international system. As is shown, while the concept has its flaws, it nevertheless opens up new opportunities for conflict management.

This work is a study on the patterns of managing ethnic relations in Serbia and Latvia. It aims at enhancing the cross-regional exchange of knowledge between the Western Balkans and the Baltic States. This study demonstrates that as the bond between geopolitics and ethnopolitics grows more powerful, the liberalization of minority policies would become less feasible within a state. It also hints that the intersection between geopolitics and ethnopolitics should not be perceived as ‘fixed’ but it can be subject to fluctuations and readjustments. Therefore, the interaction between endogenous and exogenous actors can impact the engagement(s) by the EU in the field of minority rights to varying degrees and within different contexts.