Beyond Borders: The Story Behind Bilateral Navigator

1. Take us back to the beginning. Where did the idea for Bilateral Navigator come from, and what problem were you trying to solve?

I was in Stockholm, in my first year as ambassador, and the idea came out of a frustration I had carried for a long time. My background is engineering, data science and entrepreneurship. My obsession is collecting large datasets that describe our world: companies, people, scientific discoveries, books, institutions, public registries, and the connections between them. I was sitting on all of that data, and I had just been given two countries to understand, Sweden and Latvia.

When I entered diplomacy I encountered a paradox. One of our most important responsibilities is to help the leaders at home form an opinion about the host country through our reports, and to help the host country understand ours. Yet much of this work still relies on perceptions, personal impressions, established narratives, and sometimes even prejudice. In the best case we rely on media coverage. And today's media have turned from reporting the news into creating it, producing narratives that serve their owners and sponsors. You can imagine the consequences. You can actually feel them, as the international order we knew is coming apart.

So I asked myself a simple question: what if we could understand international relationships through facts first and interpretations second? I decided to use the data I had to understand my own two countries properly. That became the first two books, in 2023: Croatia & Sweden and Croatia & Latvia.

But I quickly realised that comparing two countries in isolation is not enough. If Sweden and Croatia have similar economic structures, is that unusual? How similar are they compared with every other country? Without a global benchmark the numbers have no perspective. That is what led me to develop the Bilateral Similarity Index, the BSX, which compares countries across 40 domains against a common global reference.

And then came the realisation that changed everything. The dataset and the procedures I had built to produce two books could produce a book for any other pair of countries. What began as a practical tool for my own diplomatic work had become a global project. The real achievement was never those two books. It was the analytical system behind them.

2. Was there a particular moment when you realised that Bilateral Navigator could make a real difference in diplomacy?

Yes, and I remember it very clearly. On 13 May 2023, Stockholm hosted the EU Indo-Pacific Ministerial Forum, and our Foreign Minister had a bilateral meeting with the Foreign Minister of the Maldives. The ministry in Zagreb, together with our embassy covering the Maldives, prepared a briefing for him, as every foreign ministry on Earth would do. But Croatia has no resident mission in the Maldives, so the briefing was built mostly on media reports, as always.

It contained a sentence I have encountered countless times in my career: "There are no open issues in our bilateral relations." Diplomats love that sentence. They deliver it as if it were Archimedes shouting "Eureka." But think about what it really means. Two countries may have no political dispute, but does that mean there is nothing to discuss? No unexplored opportunities, no differences in their international positions, no economic, scientific or cultural interests worth examining? Quite often, "no open issues" is simply another way of saying that we do not know enough about one another. And it leaves a minister with nothing to say.

During that meeting a subject came up on which my Minister asked whether I could help. I had already been building the comparative data behind Bilateral Navigator, so I was able to offer a perspective grounded in facts, placing both countries in a broader international context. The reaction in the room was remarkable. A conversation that might otherwise have remained ceremonial suddenly had a new dimension. No complete book existed yet, but at that moment I felt the real need for an edition that would tell a minister far more about a country we know so little about.

Diplomacy should not be satisfied with the absence of problems. Its real purpose is to discover the presence of opportunities.

3. You often emphasise facts over narratives. Why is that distinction so important in today's international environment?

Because narratives can divide people much faster than facts can bring them together. We live in a world overflowing with information, yet that does not make us better informed. Political leaders receive enormous amounts of analysis, commentary and reporting, but more and more of it arrives already packaged inside a particular interpretation. A narrative tells you what to think about a country before you have looked at a single number. The problem is not that people have opinions. The problem begins when opinions are treated as established facts, and once a perception is embedded in foreign policy it can shape national decisions for decades.

I do not believe data eliminates politics or human judgment, and I do not believe numbers are automatically objective. Data must be selected carefully, its sources made transparent and its limitations understood. But facts give us something essential: a common starting point. When two sides sit down with the same data in front of them, the discussion moves from "what do we believe about each other" to "what do we actually have in common, and where do we differ." Two countries that fundamentally disagree on a political question may discover that they face remarkably similar demographic pressures, environmental challenges or economic dependencies. Those similarities do not erase the disagreement, but they create a basis for cooperation.

We are not trying to tell politicians or diplomats what to think. We want to give them a stronger foundation on which to reach their own conclusions. A diplomat who walks into a room with facts has an advantage. A country whose diplomats do that systematically has a strategic advantage.

4. What surprised you most when you began comparing countries systematically? Are nations more similar than we tend to believe?

Much more than we imagine. Take food. Every cuisine on Earth is built from the same handful of ingredients: flour, salt, rice, meat, fish, seafood, bananas, cocoa, sugar, milk. They are combined in different ways, with more or less spice, more or less sugar or salt, prepared by different procedures, and from those small differences a national cuisine emerges. In essence, we all eat almost the same things.

Countries are similar in that respect. We focus on differences because differences are immediately visible: languages, religions, political systems, customs. But when you compare countries systematically, you discover common patterns that are often completely unexpected. My favourite example is Croatia and North Korea. Politically, socially and institutionally the two countries could hardly be further apart. North Korea is the most enigmatic country in the world, closed off, with a political system as far from democracy as you can get. Yet if you look only at geography, hills and plains, coastline, average temperature, the distribution of land and population, it is one of the countries most similar to my own. Within our bilateral comparison, geography is their strongest area of similarity.

That is not a suggestion that Croatia resembles North Korea politically, or that geographical resemblance implies political affinity. Quite the opposite. It shows why we need to distinguish different dimensions of similarity instead of treating a country as a single, indivisible thing. Two countries can be profoundly different in one respect and unexpectedly alike in another. That is what the 40 domains are for. Once you measure all of them, you stop seeing countries as friends and strangers and start seeing a map of where cooperation is already natural and where it needs work. And sometimes finding even one meaningful similarity is enough to begin an entirely new conversation.

5. Why did you decide that all 18,528 bilateral relationships deserved their own publication, rather than focusing on the world's major countries?

Because a relationship should not be considered important only when it involves a powerful country. The arithmetic first. There are 193 member states of the United Nations, and that had to be our basis. If you want a global benchmark that everyone accepts, you need a boundary that everyone accepts, so we could not include Kosovo, Palestine or Taiwan, which many states do not recognise, nor the Holy See, which is atypical in every respect. This is a methodological boundary, not a political judgment. Among 193 countries there could in theory be 37,056 embassies, 193 times 192. Each relationship has a sending and a host country, which gives 18,528 bilateral relationships. In reality there are only around 12,000 embassies.

The real discovery came when we researched the existing literature. We could find a book or a substantial public document for only about 3 percent of the world's bilateral relationships, almost all involving major powers, historical allies, former colonial ties or long-standing economic partners. You can find extensive literature on the United States and the United Kingdom, or India and the United Kingdom. Try finding a comprehensive book on Madagascar and Uruguay, Latvia and Nepal, or Croatia and the Maldives. In most cases you will find literally nothing.

Does that mean those relationships have no value? Of course not. It means nobody has devoted attention to them. Small countries are not small to the people who live in them, and a relationship that looks insignificant today could produce tomorrow's scientific breakthrough, commercial partnership or diplomatic solution. Conflicts do not begin between countries that know each other well. They begin in the gaps, between countries that have never properly looked at each other. Giving every pair the same analytical attention, all of them, is how we build a future with fewer of those conflicts. In that sense Bilateral Navigator is an attempt to make global knowledge more inclusive.

6. Bilateral Navigator is built on very large datasets, yet contributors play an increasingly important role. Why do you call them bridge builders?

Because countries do not build relationships. People do. Governments establish frameworks, companies sign contracts, institutions conclude agreements, but behind every successful relationship you will find individuals who made it possible. We talk about facts and large-scale data, but from the beginning I wanted Bilateral Navigator to be more than a sophisticated statistical publication. Numbers can tell us how much two countries trade. They cannot explain why one entrepreneur succeeded where others failed. Statistics show how many students study abroad. They cannot describe the personal connections that turn those students into lifelong ambassadors of friendship between two nations.

So we extended the data-based content, first with contributions from ambassadors and consuls. We have received more than 1,000 contributions from them alone: interviews, images, documents, the kind of material only a mission on the ground can provide. Then we opened the door to professionals, experts in many fields who have worked across the two countries. Their contributions are shorter but significant. They explain to our readers why certain numbers matter more than others, or what is actually hidden behind the data we present. We publish them as Expert Insights, each paired with the chapter it illuminates, and we recognise every contributor with a Bridge Builders Between Nations certificate.

The name is not decoration. An ambassador, an honorary consul, an engineer who has worked in both countries: each of them has done something a database cannot measure. They have personally connected two worlds, and most of them were doing it long before we asked them to write about it. When someone opens the book about the relationship between two countries and finds their own work in its documented history, it creates a sense of belonging and of responsibility. Data gives Bilateral Navigator its structure. People give it its meaning.

7. What can someone who has lived and worked in two countries, say Sweden and Japan, contribute that even the most comprehensive database cannot?

Context. And context is usually what decides whether information becomes useful. A database can tell you that Sweden and Japan have comparable life expectancy, similar trade intensity in machinery, or a similar share of the population in large cities. It cannot tell you what silence means in a meeting in Tokyo, or why a Swedish counterpart's "we will look into it" is a yes and a Japanese counterpart's "that will be difficult" is a no. It cannot tell you which of two apparently identical numbers will decide a negotiation, or why an apparently promising partnership never progressed.

Someone who has spent ten years in Sweden and ten in Japan knows where the data is misleading, where it is exactly right, and where the official picture and daily reality diverge. Their half page sits next to the chapter it comments on, so the reader gets the number and the meaning of the number on the same spread.

Of course, individual experience is subjective too. One person's observations should never be presented as universal truths about an entire nation. That is precisely why combining many perspectives with structured data is so valuable. The numbers help us recognise patterns. The people help us understand what those patterns mean in real life. When a named professional with a real career between two countries vouches for what a chapter says, or corrects it, the book stops being a report and becomes a conversation. That is the kind of reading people actually use.

8. Bilateral Navigator began as a tool for diplomats. Why have business leaders become such an important audience?

Because diplomats and business leaders face exactly the same challenge, understanding an unfamiliar country before an important decision, and business leaders face it far more often. There are perhaps 50,000 diplomats posted abroad in the world. There are millions of companies exporting, investing, hiring or sourcing across a border, and each of them needs to understand the other side before committing money.

I have seen this from both sides. Before diplomacy I co-founded Croatia's first credit reporting agency and founded the Croatian Exporters association, so I know how a company prepares for a new market: a market study, a partner search, a lawyer, and usually no picture at all of the wider relationship between the two countries. Yet that relationship is the environment the deal lives in. Trade agreements, double-taxation treaties, visa regimes, the size of the diaspora, the universities that already cooperate, the sectors where the two economies complement each other. There is plenty of country-level information for sale. Very little is organised around the relationship between two specific countries, and that distinction matters enormously. A Swedish company looking at a market in Southeast Asia does not need a general report on that destination. It needs to understand that market in relation to Sweden.

The similarity index is especially useful here. It shows a company where its home market is closer to a foreign one than people assume, and therefore where entry is easier than the stereotypes suggest. And there is a further dimension. Trade statistics tell us what business is already taking place. The more interesting question is what business is not taking place yet, and why. Often the opportunity is attractive and the right people have simply never met. That is why our evolution from books into a platform matters: we want to help users move from understanding a relationship to finding the people and institutions that can develop it. Chambers of commerce, export agencies and honorary consuls understood this quickly, and they are now among our most engaged readers.

9. On 25 September 2026, Bilateral Navigator was presented at United Nations Headquarters in New York. What did that moment mean to you, and what did you learn from the reaction?

For me personally it was one of the biggest days of my life, and there was a historical symmetry in it. More than thirty years earlier, in the early 1990s, I had walked into that same building wearing the badge of a small Croatian non-governmental organisation, at a time when we were working to strengthen the international position of a newly independent country. Three decades later I returned as a Croatian ambassador, with a project dedicated to every bilateral relationship among the 193 member states. I could not have imagined such a moment back then.

The presentation took place during the high-level week of the 81st General Assembly, under the auspices of its President, Dr Khalilur Rahman, immediately after the Prime Minister of Croatia, Andrej Plenković, had addressed the Assembly. The Prime Minister, Foreign Minister Gordan Grlić Radman and former President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović took part, together with Dr Srgjan Kerim, former President of the General Assembly and chairman of our Board of Senior Counselors, and our co-founders and supporters. We presented the complete collections for Croatia and Bangladesh, 192 volumes each.

What impressed me most was not the ceremony but the reaction to the idea. President Rahman called Bilateral Navigator a gift of Croatia to the world, which is exactly how we had always thought of it, and he said it could make the work of diplomats easier. Prime Minister Plenković pointed out its value not only for diplomats but for business leaders, scientists, travellers and anyone working across cultures. And Dr Kerim drew attention to the sheer number of bilateral meetings taking place during that single week, thousands of conversations whose participants often have very little time to prepare. If we can make even a fraction of them better informed, the contribution is substantial.

The lesson was practical. The first thing the United Nations asked for was not more books but electronic availability: full coverage, continuous updates and access from anywhere. The printed volumes convinced people that the work is real. The next step, which we are already building, is to make the same content available as a living digital service, with a non-commercial arrangement for the United Nations itself. What began as my personal effort to improve diplomatic preparation has the potential to become shared international infrastructure.

10. Looking five years ahead, where do you want Bilateral Navigator to be, and what would you consider its greatest achievement?

In five years I want Bilateral Navigator to be the thing people instinctively consult whenever they want to understand or develop a relationship between two countries. I want every embassy in the world, all 12,000 of them, to have it open on the desk, not on the shelf. The books were the proof. The next stage is Bilateral Network, the platform we are building at bilateral.net, where each of the 18,528 relationships becomes a living edition, continuously updated, with the daily tools a mission actually needs: who is accredited where, what the partner country said at the United Nations last week, which companies on each side are looking for each other.

I want the same for business. A company considering a new market should be able to read the relationship between its country and that market the way it reads a balance sheet, in minutes, with the experts who know both sides a click away. And I want it for the scientist looking for collaborators, the cultural institution planning an exchange, the member of a diaspora searching for a professional connection with the country of origin. All of them are participating in bilateral relationships, even if they have never thought of their work in those terms.

I also want it to serve the international community as a whole. With fewer than five years left to 2030 and most Sustainable Development Goals off track, the world cannot afford cooperation by intuition. Every partnership between two member states is a potential delivery vehicle, and if we can see which relationships are underdeveloped relative to their potential, we can direct effort where it yields the most. Croatia is a country of under four million people. It cannot have a mission everywhere, but it can be smart, and I believe that in this century the decisive diplomatic resource is not size but insight.

Ultimately I will not judge our success by the number of books, the size of the database or even the number of people on the platform. I will judge it by the relationships that would not have existed without it. A new scientific collaboration. An unexpected business partnership. A diplomatic conversation that prevents a misunderstanding. Perhaps a small contribution to resolving a conflict before it begins. International relations are made by presidents and ministers, but they are also made every day by entrepreneurs, teachers, scientists, students and artists. The foundations of multilateral cooperation are built from successful bilateral relationships, and if we want a better-connected world, we should begin by understanding the relationships from which that world is made.