Please join the Harriman Institute at Columbia University for a book talk with Iva Vukušić, author of “Serbian Paramilitaries and the Breakup of Yugoslavia”, discussed by Vladimir Petrović, Boston University. Moderated by Tanya Domi, Harriman Institute.
Dr. Iva Vukušić is an Assistant Professor in International History at Utrecht University and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. She is a historian and a genocide scholar, and her work is on irregular armed groups, genocide, mass violence and transitional justice, especially criminal accountability. Before coming to The Hague in 2009, she spent three years in Sarajevo, where she worked as a researcher and analyst at the Special Department for War Crimes at the Office of the Prosecutor. She is a frequent contributor in public debates and has been interviewed for the New York Times, the Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, de Volkskrant, the BBC, etc. Her first book “Serbian Paramilitaries and the Breakup of Yugoslavia: State Connections and Patterns of Violence” comes out in September 2022 in the Contemporary Security Studies at Routledge. Iva is also one of three editors of the new CEU Press series “Perpetrators of Organized Violence: Eastern, Central and South-Eastern Europe”.
Vladimir Petrovic researches mass political violence and strategies of confrontation with its legacy. He graduated from Contemporary history (Faculty of Belgrade: BA and MPhil) and Comparative history of Central and Southeastern Europe (Central European University: MA and PhD), completing his postgraduate studies at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Amsterdam. His latest book in English, “The Emergence of Historical Forensic Expertise: Clio takes the Stand” (Routledge, 2017) examines the role of historians and social scientists as expert witnesses in some of the most dramatic legal encounters of the 20th century. Petrovic was himself working in this intersection between history and law, both in the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and in the Serbian War Crimes Prosecutor’s Office. He published extensively on ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and attempts to undo its legacy (his most recent book in Serbian “Etničko čišćenje: geneza koncepta”, 2019), as well as on the history of nonalignment during the Cold War (“Titova lična diplomatija”, 2010). He is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Contemporary History in Belgrade, as well as a Core Curriculum faculty at Boston University. He is also a visiting professor at Central European University, where he is also among the conveners of the Invisible University for Ukraine.
