In 2001, Biljana Plavšić made history. Indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, she became the only female political leader ever prosecuted for mass atrocities. By the time the Tribunal closed in 2017, after 24 years in operation, she remained the only woman among the 161 people it had indicted. Charged by the Tribunal for genocide and crimes against humanity, Plavśić’s plea bargain made her the first woman to be convicted by an international court since Nuremberg. The only comparably senior Bosnian Serb politician to be sentenced was Radovan Karadžić himself—President to Plavśić’s Vice-President in Bosnia’s autonomous Republika Srpska, a role she then took over after the Bosnian peace. Yet until the Yugoslav Wars erupted in 1991, Plavšić had been an internationally renowned scientist and faculty dean at the University of Sarajevo, with over 100 journal articles to her name. Now in her 90s, and a free woman, Plavšić is also the Tribunal’s oldest convicted defendant. Olivera Simić’s gripping book is based on hundreds of hours of interviews with a stridently unrepentant war criminal, recorded over seven years. How did this biology professor end up running a vengeful ethno-nationalist movement that killed tens of thousands?

This longitudinal study is based on the story of Lola, who was gang raped during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992.  At the time, she was in a detention camp with her young children. Only one of Lola’s several perpetrators was convicted but his sentence of six years of imprisonment has never been actioned by the Bosnian judiciary. Lola’s rapist is still free and she lives in continual fear that he will retaliate against her and her children for her role in his trial. Lola’s War has been shortlisted for Australian Legal Research Book Award 2024.

Drawing on interviews with Bosnian Serb women survivors of rape in Bosnia and Herzegovina, feminist activists, local media, documentary and archival sources, the book examines ‘post-conflict justice’ as it is seen, lived and interpreted by women who belong to ‘perpetrator’ nation. The book will be of great interest and use to researchers, students and practitioners within post-conflict law and justice, international criminal law, security studies and gender studies.

Surviving Peace is one woman’s story of courage that echoes the stories of millions of people whose lives have been displaced by war. As we still face a world rife with armed conflict, this book is a timely reminder that once the last gunshot has been fired and the last bomb dropped, the new challenge of surviving peace begins.

This book critically examines the response of the United Nations (UN) to the problem of sexual exploitation in UN Peace Support Operations. It assesses the Secretary-General’s Bulletin on Special Protection from Sexual Exploitation and Sexual Abuse (2003) (SGB) and its definition of sexual exploitation, which includes sexual relationships and prostitution. With reference to people affected by the policy (using the example of Bosnian women and UN peacekeepers), and taking account of both radical and ‘sex positive’ feminist perspectives, the book finds that the inclusion of consensual sexual relationships and prostitution in the definition of sexual exploitation is not tenable.