Dr. Azra Hromadžić, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Syracuse University, will speak about “Youth and State Making in Post-Genocide Bosnia-Herzegovina,” under the auspices of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. The event is free and open to the public.

In the wake of devastating conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the polarizing effects of everyday ethnic divisions, combined with hardened allegiances to ethnic nationalism and the rigid arrangements imposed in international peace-building agreements, have produced what Azra Hromadžić calls an “empty nation.” Hromadžić explores the void created by unresolved tensions between mandated reunification initiatives and the segregation institutionalized by power-sharing democracy, and how these conditions are experienced by youths who have come of age in postconflict Bosnia-Herzegovina.

A native of Bosnia, Azra Hromadžić completed her Ph.D., as well as her master and bachelor degrees, in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests in the anthropology of international policy in the context of state-making in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina. She is the author of Citizens of an Empty Nation: Youth and State-making in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina (University of Pennsylvania Press), is an ethnographic investigation of the internationally directed postwar intervention policies in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the response of local people, especially youth, to these policy efforts.