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History · ·6 min read

Sarajevo Institute — founded in 1992, the year it now studies

The Institute for the Research of Crimes Against Humanity and International Law was founded in Sarajevo in 1992, the year the siege began, and integrated with the University of Sarajevo in 2004. On 1 to 3 July 2025 it hosted roughly forty international scholars — from Bosnia, Rwanda, Turkey, the Netherlands, Ireland, the United States, Kenya, Australia, Japan and beyond — for a scientific conference marking the 30th anniversary of Srebrenica. The book of abstracts was published in Sarajevo the same year, edited by Ermin Kuka, Hikmet Karčić and Merisa Karović-Babić.

By Nedim Hadzimahmutovic · Sarajevo

The building sits on the campus of the University of Sarajevo near Skenderija. A mid-sized concrete institutional block, unremarkable from the street. A small sign at the entrance reads: Institut za istraživanje zločina protiv čovječnosti i međunarodnog prava. In English: Institute for the Research of Crimes Against Humanity and International Law. Not a place tourists visit. But it is the building where most of the scholarly literature on the siege of Sarajevo, the attack on the National Library, and the 1995 genocide at Srebrenica has been produced for the last three decades.

On 1 to 3 July 2025 the Institute hosted an international scientific conference in Sarajevo marking the thirtieth anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide. The programme drew roughly forty presenters from five continents. The Book of Abstracts was published in Sarajevo the same year, edited by three of the Institute’s senior staff.

What the Institute is

Prof. Smail Čekić founded the Institute in Sarajevo in 1992, the same year the siege began. Čekić, a historian who had spent the previous decade working on the archives of the Second World War in Bosnia, argued that the aggression against Bosnia and Herzegovina needed to be documented as it happened, from inside the city, so it would be defensible under future international legal frameworks. The Institute began work under siege conditions in a single office in the Skenderija complex.

By 1995 the Institute had produced its first tranche of standard-source publications on the war. In 2004 it was formally integrated with the University of Sarajevo and became a research unit of the Faculty of Political Sciences. Its current director is Dr. Muamer Džananović. Its senior researchers, Prof. Dr. Ermin Kuka, Dr. Hikmet Karčić, Dr. Merisa Karović-Babić, are the editors of the 2025 Book of Abstracts, each a widely cited scholar in international genocide studies. Karčić’s work on genocide denial has been translated into eight languages.

The Institute now maintains one of the largest working archives in the world on the 1992–1995 aggression against Bosnia. It publishes the peer-reviewed journal Prilozi za istraživanje zločina protiv čovječnosti i međunarodnog prava (roughly, Contributions to the Research of Crimes Against Humanity and International Law) and has trained roughly two hundred PhD candidates in its thirty-plus years. Former staff and doctoral graduates now teach at universities in Vienna, Utrecht, London, Chicago, and Nairobi.

The July 2025 conference

The conference was the Institute’s principal marker of the Srebrenica thirtieth anniversary. It was titled “Srebrenica 30 Years After the Genocide: Memory, Responsibility, and the Challenges of Denial.” The Book of Abstracts, translated by Dr. Melina Sadiković and designed by M.A. Sead Muhić, runs to roughly ninety-six pages.

The presenters were:

  • From Bosnia and Herzegovina: Edina Bećirević (Denying genocide, undermining peace); Mujo Begić (Concealment of genocide — the case of mass-grave relocation); Muamer Džananović (Genocide denial in BiH — from mass graves to the UN Resolution); Fahira Fejzić-Čengić (What is the degradation ceremony in the genocide project?); Hikmet Karčić (Resolutions as instruments of memory — the UN General Assembly); Merisa Karović-Babić (Hostage crisis, rapid reaction forces and the genocide in Srebrenica); Zilha Mastalić-Košuta (Strategic plans and directives for the takeover of Srebrenica 1992–1995); Jasmin Medić (Guilty pleas before the ICTY); Ehlimana Memišević (Prosecution of rape as a weapon of genocide); Elvedin Mulagić (Comparative analysis — Tutsis in Rwanda and Bosniaks in Bosnia); Edin Omerčić (Serbian Orthodox Church and genocide in BiH); Enis Omerović (Provisional measures in the practice of the ICJ); Lada Sadiković (The adequacy of BiH’s constitutional structure thirty years after the genocide); Izet Šabotić (The genocide against the Bosniaks of Srebrenica as a historical narrative in the curricula); Sead Turčalo (The construction of narrative and the institutionalization of genocide denial); and Hasan Nuhanović, the Dutchbat interpreter whose family was killed in July 1995 and who is the author of the memoir Under the UN Flag (2007).
  • From the United States: Norman Naimark (Stanford — Srebrenica in the comparative history of genocide); Ben Kiernan (Yale — the Bosnian genocide in historical and ideological context); Samuel Totten (Has the international community actually learned anything?); Emil Kerenji (US Holocaust Memorial Museum — historical and legal frameworks); Henry Theriault (What is a genocide? — the need to recognise the full genocide against Bosniaks 1992–1995); Benjamin Valentino (Dartmouth — Lessons from Srebrenica); Kim Sadique (Srebrenica, never again to no-one and nowhere).
  • From the United Kingdom: Martin Shaw (The changing faces of denial); Marko Attila Hoare (Kingston — the Srebrenica massacre as the culmination of the Bosnian genocide).
  • From Turkey: Pinar Akarcay (Politicide and democide in BiH); Onur Uraz (Establishing state responsibility for genocide in international law).
  • From the Netherlands: Nike Wentholt (From apologetic denial to denying apologies — Dutch (mis)recognition of Srebrenica as shared Bosnian-Dutch history).
  • From Rwanda: Eric Ndushabandi (Healing communities and social cohesion — the trans-generational transmission of memory in post-genocide Rwanda); Rafiki Ubaldo (Photography as testimony, witness, story, and memory).
  • From Kenya: David Simon and Sophie Foster (Yale/GAAP — Return and belonging: three decades of struggle in Srebrenica).
  • From Australia: Hariz Halilovich (RMIT — Voicing the unspeakable: testimonial literature on the Srebrenica genocide).
  • From Germany: Dirk Moses (Rethinking the war vs. genocide dichotomy).
  • From Italy: Rosa Aloisi and Jayden Salter (Resistance to memorialization).

What the conference did

The three-day programme mapped the state of the field, session by session: the historical and legal frameworks; denial, its mechanisms, its cross-border patterns, its institutionalisation in particular states; comparative genocide studies (Rwanda, Cambodia, Armenia, Turkey, the Rohingya); memorialisation and cultural memory; and testimonial literature, where Halilovich’s paper drew on Sarajevo’s own War Childhood Museum methodology.

Two threads ran through the entire conference. The first was that denial is now the primary post-genocide project, an institutional pattern operating in several member states of the UN. The second was that memory work is winning, slowly, on documented ground: the UN General Assembly’s Resolution A/RES/78/282 of 23 May 2024 established 11 July as the International Day of Reflection and Commemoration of the 1995 Genocide in Srebrenica. Karčić’s paper analysed the vote count and the amendments negotiated in the ten days before the resolution passed.

Sarajevo as a graduate school

The larger observation the July 2025 conference makes visible has been building for thirty years: Sarajevo is now one of the world’s principal graduate schools for the international academic study of genocide prevention. Doctoral students from Rwanda, Kenya, Turkey, the Netherlands, and the United States apply to Sarajevo specifically because the archives are here, the survivors are here, and the Institute is now a recognised name in the field.

The 2018 Catholic Theological Ethics conference was an earlier instance of this international pull. The July 2025 Srebrenica 30 conference is another. The Institute publishes conference proceedings the year after each event. The 2025 volume is already in press.

Read the abstracts

The Book of Abstracts is available from the Institute in print and online (in Bosnian and English) at iikpz.unsa.ba. At ninety-six pages it reads in an hour. Nuhanović’s abstract is on page 47. Norman Naimark’s is on page 44. Karčić’s on the UN Resolution is on page 32. The full papers will appear in the Institute’s journal during 2026.

The Institute itself receives researchers on request. It is a working academic institution, not a memorial or a museum, and the staff are patient with visitors who arrive with specific questions and a letter of introduction. Its main entrance is on the Skenderija side of the university complex. The best days to visit are Tuesday and Wednesday mornings. Say you have read the Book of Abstracts. The staff will know why you are there.

Sources & further reading

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