In this scholarly panel, Guido Franzinetti, John Breuilly, Béatrice von Hirschhausen, and Sabine Rutar discuss Diana Mishkova's monograph Beyond Balkanism. The Scholarly Politics of Region Making, published in the Routledge Borderland Studies series (2018; paperback edition 2020). The panel focuses, from various angles, precisely on how 'region making' has been influenced by scholarly politics and other kinds of policy discourses. The take of each author is conditioned by their respective expertise in European and global area studies.