NATO’s Strategic Engagement with Religious Landscapes: Navigating Sovereignty, Hybrid Warfare, and Sacred Spaces in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Balkans

Abstract

This issue brief examines the strategic significance of religious landscapes in the Western Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean within NATO’s evolving security framework. It argues that sacred spaces are no longer peripheral cultural concerns but constitute part of the broader strategic environment in which sovereignty, memory, mobility, and hybrid threats intersect. Through the empirical example of Kosovo and KFOR’s protection of Serbian Orthodox heritage sites, it demonstrates how monasteries, pilgrimage routes, and religious infrastructure can become focal points of political mobilization, information warfare, and contested legitimacy. The analysis further situates these dynamics within NATO’s emerging approaches to human security, resilience, and cultural property protection. Extending the discussion to the Eastern Mediterranean, it highlights how maritime insecurity, disinformation, and unresolved political disputes may transform symbolic religious sites into operational flashpoints. It concludes that NATO should adopt a landscape-based resilience approach integrating physical security, information resilience, cultural literacy, and institutional coordination in order to mitigate hybrid escalation and strengthen regional stability.

Introduction

In the contemporary framework of strategic analysis, religion is no longer considered a secondary cultural factor, unrelated to specific security interests. Within the framework of the
Eastern Mediterranean and the Balkans, sacred space, pilgrimage routes, monastic complexes, and ecclesiastical authority structures are situated within contested sovereignty, borderlands, memory, and mobility. Sacred space is no longer considered merely a symbol of faith but a carrier of legitimacy, a repository of memory, and a potential catalyst for political mobilization. Situated within a framework of unresolved status conflicts, coexistence challenges, and hybridization pressures, sacred space may become a tool through which a micro-level conflict may escalate to a wider strategic conflict.

This issue brief argues that NATO’s engagement with religious landscapes should no longer be
considered engagement with theology and faith but as a tool of a wider resilience-based security strategy. Situated within a framework of hybridization, civilian vulnerability, and contested authority, sacred space may become a tool of strategic importance. Within this, the empirical case of the Western Balkans and, more specifically, Kosovo may offer the most compelling example of this argument. At the same time, the Eastern Mediterranean may offer a parallel environment within which a wider conflict may lead to the operationalization of religious geography. It is within this context that this issue brief seeks to critically evaluate the role of NATO’s evolving human security, cultural property protection, and resilience strategy within a wider and more mature framework of strategic analysis of sacred space.

Strategic Imperatives of Religious Geography

In the religious landscapes of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Balkans, the issue is not one of peripherality in relation to security but rather one in which the religious is embedded in transport corridors, borderlands, sea lanes, memory politics, and contested sovereignty. In regions where revisionist narratives, foreign information campaigns, and social fragmentation exist below the level of conventional warfare, NATO no longer views religious geography as a purely cultural and humanitarian issue, but rather as an integral part of its overall responsibility and mandate.

The core argument of the current article is that NATO’s involvement in religious geography
does not primarily focus on confessional issues; instead, it is part of a broader strategy aimed at maintaining stability in regions where religious geography intersects with contested sovereignty, hybrid threats, and civilian vulnerability. This is already the case in the Western Balkans, especially in Kosovo, where the Kosovo Force or KFOR mission includes the protection of Serbian Orthodox religious sites under the UN mandate. It becomes increasingly relevant to the Eastern Mediterranean, where maritime insecurity, competition, disinformation, and political conflicts may rapidly escalate symbolic religious sites into operational flashpoints. The recent policy development within NATO in human security and cultural property protection offers a useful doctrinal basis, albeit with implementation being patchy and conceptually undeveloped.

In its 2022 Strategic Concept, NATO identifies the Western Balkans and the Black Sea area as
being strategically important, with a focus on resilience against coercion, as well as malign third-party influence. While the document does not specifically focus on religion, its emphasis on resilience, crisis prevention, and cooperative security has direct relevance to areas of religious significance. The Alliance’s Human Security Approach, agreed upon in Madrid, is more specific, with cultural property protection being one of the five domains through which the Alliance aims to reduce harm to civilians and increase operational understanding. As a result, the protection of churches, monasteries, archives, sacred art, and religious access routes shifts from being a sensitivity to a planning priority.