Last Friday I attended a conference entitled fY + 20 (the former Yugoslavia plus 20 years) organized by my co-author Dr Carl Dahlman at the Miami University in Oxford Ohio (with the help of others and sponsoring institutions). It was a small but high quality conference with some excellent presentations and discussions by, among others, Robert Donia, John Agnew and Robert Hayden. I presented a paper on Dodik and my research assistant (RA) presented our joint project on Radovan Karadzic and the 1990 election campaign which we will also present at the forthcoming Association for the Study of Nationalities conference in April in New York. It was great to learn that Dr Donia, author of the excellent Sarajevo: A Biography, is finishing a biography on this “founding father” of Republika Srpska.

The other infamous founding father, of course, is Radko Mladic (insert picture is one I took of graffiti on destroyed building in Srebrenica, summer 2005). Today, Dr John O’Loughlin, my RA and I had an informal presentation at the US Holocaust Museum where we met with Michael Dobbs and a number of others. He is working on a research project on Mladic and has written important background articles which is available on the Foreign Policy web site. He and his RA Sarah Collman are also gathering materials The Mladic Files which are available on the Holocaust Museum website.

Tis great to see that the hard work of research on these two figures now before the ICTY is now occurring. There is still a lot to be learnt about both figures and about the crucial turning points in Bosnia’s decent into bloody civil war.