Erion Veliaj, a former civil society activist and coordinator of the Albanian opposition parties, discussed the demonstration held on January 21, 2011. The demonstration ended in violence, with four shot and killed by the Republican Guard. Prime Minister Sali Berisha characterized the event as an attempted coup d'état in an attempt to justify the violent response, and said that the demonstrators had been carrying weapons disguised as umbrellas. Veliaj argued at the meeting that these contentions were "ludicrous": according to Veliaj, this was just another in a number of peaceful demonstrations organized by the opposition to protest what they see were unfair elections in 2009. The Albanian government, Veliaj said, was trying to force the population to choose between stability and freedom.

Southeast Europe—a region still vulnerable from recent conflict, underdevelopment and reliance on foreign direct investment—has been uniquely effected by the global economic crisis. Citing his recent publication, Vassilis Monastiriotis explained that the region's underdevelopment had in part protected it from the financial crisis and that good policies have helped some countries to rebound more quickly.

With varying degrees of success, authoritarian regimes frequently co-opt their citizens to gather information on and undermine their domestic opposition. According to Martin Dimitrov, communist Bulgaria's ability to suppress dissent was diminished from the 1970s onward because the Western-led international human rights regime forced the government to replace harsher methods it had previously used with a system of rewards for volunteer informants and reprimands for dissidents. The ineffectiveness of these tactics contributed to the regime's eventual collapse. In contrast, Joseph Sassoon explained that Iraq's Ba'th Party—unable to rely upon a superpower for support and steeled by a series of wars—was able to remain in power for thirty-five years in part because it did not relax its efforts at co-optation and repression as the regime matured.

"Open energy markets—which is the ability of oil and gas to flow to the purchaser—is really the core of our energy security," said David Goldwyn, the State Department's special envoy for international energy affairs. Making sure markets are open, fair, and transparent is one of five tenets of the administration's global energy security agenda that he discussed at a January 11 Director's Forum.