The pre-war Institute published the Revue internationale des Études balkaniques, a prestigious scholarly journal written in French, English and German.

Among its members, past and current directors, the most prominent have been Radovan Samardžić, Nikola Tasić and Dušan T. Bataković.

The Institute for Balkan Studies has organized a number of domestic and international conferences promoting intellectual exchange and cooperation between scholarly communities at both the regional and European level.

The Institute for Balkan Studies declares itself to be committed to rigorous scholarly research aimed at furthering the understanding of an oft-stereotyped European region both in terms of its distinctiveness and of its inseparability from the rest of the world.

In order to reach a broader scholarly audience Balcanica has been published in English and French since 2006 (nº XXXVI).