Geopolitics has long been neglected and denied. It has been dismissively reduced to an "outdated approach", "archaic way of thinking", "ideological dogma", "doctrinal deviation"…, thus denying its scientific and practical value. Despite this, geopolitics has evolved from a scientific discipline to the level of an independent science, while the world has simultaneously become increasingly geopolitical. The Balkans are synonymous with geopolitics and have never ceased to face this fact. No matter how much it "fled" from geopolitics, geopolitics has always "caught up" with it. This past, present, and undoubtedly future particularly applies to Serbia, the Serbian people, and Serbian lands as a whole. It has been shown that thinking and acting geopolitically is of vital importance for Serbs.

Today, Serbian scientific, educational, cultural, media, and public scenes in general are facing the reaffirmation of geopolitics. This is an "echo" of turbulent processes of power redistribution and political-territorial restructuring from the global to the regional level. Causes and consequences are most adequately explained in a geopolitical manner, and this throughout the world without exception – from Beijing and Tokyo, to Washington and Buenos Aires, and from Moscow and Berlin, to New Delhi and Pretoria. Paradoxically – on one hand, geopolitics is hit by a true flood of sensationalist analyses by "showbiz" newspaper, podcast, and TV analysts, from which it is threatened with the danger of becoming "everything and nothing". On the other hand, it is positioned slowly and insufficiently in higher education and scientific-research institutions, where so-called old sciences want to keep it in a state of hibernation.

Therefore, the formation of the Center for Geopolitical Research is not only an academic but also a practical need. It should be a center of gravity for already geopolitically educated and research-proven authors where they will discuss current phenomena and processes, question stereotypes and deconstruct prejudices, and strategically consider scenarios for the time ahead, primarily in the Balkan and Serbian key. Simultaneously, it will gather young people and provide them with the missing geopolitical knowledge, motivating them to direct their creative energy toward thinking in terms of "spatialization of the political". For only in that case will the future not surprise them, but they will surprise and create the future. On the "front line" of their own, their people, and their state.

Milomir Stepić was born on 30 August 1959 in Belgrade. At the Faculty of Geography, University of Belgrade, he earned his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. and taught until 2008. He was a full professor at the Faculty of Geoeconomics from 2008 to 2012. From 2012 until his retirement in 2025, he worked as a research adviser at the Institute for Political Studies.

As an adjunct and visiting professor, he has taught (or currently teaches) at the Faculty of Economics, the Faculty of Law, and the Faculty of Political Sciences in Belgrade and Banja Luka, the Higher Studies of Security and Defence of the Military Academy, the Diplomatic Academy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Serbia, and the Serbian Internet Academy. He served as Vice-Dean for Science at the Faculty of Geography, and as a permanent associate and board member of the former private Institute for Geopolitical Studies.

He is the author or co-author of detailed ethnic maps of the former Yugoslav area and one of the initiators of the scientific project “The Ethnic Space of the Serbs” at the Faculty of Geography, University of Belgrade (1991–1995), which resulted in several co-authored monographs in Serbian, Greek, and English, as well as documentation for the Conference on Yugoslavia in London in 1992.

He is a member of the Serbian Geographical Society, the “Sveti Sava” Society, “Matica srpska” (the Board of the Department for Social Sciences), the SASA Committee for the Study of Population, and the SASA Committee for the Study of Kosovo and Metohija. He serves on the editorial boards of the scientific journals “Politeia” and “Kosovsko-metohijski zbornik”. He was the editor of “Zbornik Matice srpske za društvene nauke” from 2020 to 2022. Until his retirement, he headed the Center for Geopolitics at the Institute for Political Studies in Belgrade. Since early 2023, he has been the editor-in-chief of the scientific journal “Nacionalni interes”.

He focuses on theoretical geopolitics, the geopolitics of the Balkans, and the geopolitics of Serbian lands. He has written numerous scientific papers, textbooks, encyclopedic entries, and chapters in monographs in Serbian, Russian, and English. He has organized a number of notable scientific conferences and edited several domestic and international collections of papers. He is a long-time geopolitical columnist for the weekly “Pečat” and the portals “RT Balkan” and “EagleEyeExplore”.

He is the recipient of the Order of the Karađorđe Star of the Republic of Srpska, 1st class, and the winner of the “Pečat vremena” award for science and social theory (2017) and the “Dimitrije Bogdanović” award for the social and humanities sciences (2023).

To date, he has published 19 authored and co-authored books—3 textbooks and 16 scholarly monographs. The monographs are: