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Ivan Vejvoda is currently Vice President, Programs. From 2003 to 2010 he served as executive director of the Balkan Trust for Democracy, a project of the German Marshall Fund dedicated to strengthening democratic institutions in Southeastern Europe. Mr. Vejvoda came to GMF in 2003 from distinguished service in the Serbian government as senior advisor on foreign policy and European integration to Prime Ministers Zoran Djindjic and Zoran Zivkovic. Prior to that, he served as executive director of the Belgrade-based Fund for an Open Society from 1998 to 2002.
During the mid-1990s, Mr. Vejvoda held various academic posts in the United States and the United Kingdom, including one-year appointments as associate professor at Smith College in Massachusetts and Macalester College in Minnesota, and a three-year research fellowship at the University of Sussex in England. Mr. Vejvoda was a key figure in the democratic opposition movement in Yugoslavia through the 1990s, and is widely published on the subjects of democratic transition, totalitarianism, and post-war reconstruction in the Balkans. He is a member of the Serbian Pen Club and is a board member of American social science journals Constellations and Philosophy and Social Criticism.
Seminar Leader: political, historical, and social context
Gordana Matkovic, PHD is Director of Social Policy Studies at the Centre for Liberal Democratic Studies and Associate Professor at the Faculty of Economics, Finance, and Administration in Belgrade, Serbia. Previously, she served as General Advisor to President of Serbia Boris Tadic (2008-2012) and Minister of Social Affairs under Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic (2000-2004). Under her ministerial mandate, Serbia launched a major reform of its social protection and pension systems and adopted its Poverty Reduction Strategy. Dr. Matkovic’s interests and expertise include labour economics, demography, social policy, social insurance, and human development. Her most notable publications are Demographic Factors and Labour Supply (1994) and Decentralization of Social Welfare in Serbia (2006). In 2004, Dr. Matkovic received the Konstantnin Obradovic award for human rights promotion and in 2005, she won the annual Women in Business and Government Award of Erste Bank and European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
Themes: social security and pension systems, poverty reduction, and administrative reform.
Boro Kontic is Director of Mediacenter – Sarajevo, a training and research centre that supports the development of professional and independent journalism in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Mr. Kontic began his distinguished career at Radio Sarajevo, where he began as a journalist and advanced to the position of Editor in Chief of Youth Program (1987-1990) and then of Second Program (1990-1992). The war found him as a Member of the Executive Board of Radio-Television of Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992-1993), which he soon left to become a Special Correspondent of the Voice of America (1994-2003). Mr. Kontic is a veteran of Bosnian journalism. He is a graduate of the Faculty of Law at the University of Sarajevo, and a recipient of Prix Futura Berlin and Prix Italy for his radio documentary JAZZTIME (1991).
Themes: journalism and war correspondence.
Nina Obuljen is Chair of the Programme Council of the Croatian Radio and Television and a research fellow at the Institute for International Relations in Zagreb. As State Secretary at the Croatian Ministry of Culture (2007-2011), she was a member of the EU accession negotiations team responsible for culture, education, information society, and the media, and was involved in negotiations on 10 other chapters, including state aid, taxes, intellectual property rights, and customs. Ms. Obuljen also led a Croatian delegation at the UNESCO Convention on Cultural Diversity for two years (2004-2005) and chaired the Intergovernmental Committee of the Convention for one (2010). She holds an M.A. in Political Science from the University of Zagreb and the European Cultural Policy Research Award. Ms. Obuljen is an expert on cultural policies in the Balkans and the impact of EU enlargement on cultural policy in general.
Themes: EU enlargement, identity, culture, and cultural policy.
Srdja Popovic is one of the founders of Serbian nonviolent resistance movement to the former President of Serbia and Yugoslavia Slobodan Milosevic – OTPOR! Founded in 2000, the movement was instrumental in generating mass support for street protests that toppled Milosevic and brought about democratic change to Serbia. Following his service as a Member of Parliament (2000-2003), Mr. Popovic and a group of several other former OTPOR! activists founded a non-profit Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS) that spread OTPOR!’s non-violent strategies and tactics to other parts of the world. CANVAS is credited with the successful outcomes of the Georgian “Rose Revolution” (2003) and Ukrainian “Orange Revolution” (2004-2005). Its approach was also applied in Lebanon in 2004, Maldives in 2008, and Egypt in 2011. Following the successes of the Arab Spring, the Foreign Policy Magazine listed Srdja Popovic as one of the “Top 100 Global Thinkers” of 2011, when he was also nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Mr. Popovic has a M.Sc. in biology from the University of Belgrade.
Themes: mass movements, nonviolent resistance, and regime change.
Dervo Sejdic is a prominent Bosnian Roma activist and Vice President of the Roma Information Centre in Sarajevo. In 2006, he joined forces with a leading member of the Bosnian Jewish community and Bosnia’s current ambassador to Switzerland, Jakob Finci, to launch a suit against Bosnia and Herzegovina for discrimination before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. Three years later, the two won the suit and Bosnia and Herzegovina was ordered to amend its constitution to allow for minority representation in all branches of its government. The amendments were never introduced, and Bosnia continues to elect its officials on national quotas which only allow for representation of the three dominant nationalities, Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs.
Themes: human rights, minority rights, and discrimination.
Ana Trbovic is the Director of the Centre for European Integration and Public Administration at the Faculty of Economics, Finance, and Administration, Belgrade, Serbia. She is also a partner at EuroBalkan Advisors, which provides consulting services to private companies and international organizations including OECD, World Bank and USAID. Under Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic, Dr. Trbovic served at the Ministry of International Economic Relations as the Head of the Department for European Integration. While in government, she drafted Serbia’s first strategy for attracting direct foreign investments. Dr. Trbovic has written extensively on public administration, European integration, and strategic management. Her major publications include A Legal Geography of Yugoslavia’s Disintegration (Oxford University Press, 2008) and Public Administration and European Integration of Serbia (FEFA and Institute for Textbooks, 2010). Dr. Trbovic holds a PhD and MA from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy; MPA from the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard; and B.A. from Tufts University.
Themes: public administration, direct foreign investments, and business climate in emerging markets.
Jelena Berkovic is a human rights activist and Deputy Director of the Croatian NGO GONG. She currently coordinates a program that advocates for higher standards for consumer and health protection as outlined in Chapter 23 of the acquis communautaire, the cumulative body of laws which constitute the legal order of the EU. Ms. Berkovic joined GONG as a full-time staff-member in 2010, after having served at its Council and Supervisory Board. Previously, she was a member of the Croatian Parliamentary Committee on Information, Computerization, and the Media (2008-2011) and an editor and journalist on Zagreb’s Radio 101 (1998-2010). Ms. Berkovic graduated in journalism from the University of Zagreb, and holds a M.Sc. in global politics from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is a Marshall Memorial Fellow since 2012.
Themes: consumer protection.
More to come…
