Professor Denisa Kostovicova

Professor Denisa Kostovicova is a leading scholar of post-conflict reconstruction with a particular interest in post-conflict justice processes.

She is the author of Kosovo: The Politics of Identity and Space (Routledge, 2005) and Reconciliation by Stealth: How People Talk about War Crimes (Cornell University Press, 2024), which is the Winner of the Best Book in Human Rights of the International Studies Association (ISA) and has also received Honourable Mention of the Joseph Rothschild Prize in Nationalism and Ethnic Studies of the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN) and Honourable Mention of the George Blazyca Book Prize of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES). Professor Kostovicova has co-edited a number volumes, including Transnationalism in the Balkans (Routledge, 2008), Persistent State Weakness in the Global Age (Ashgate 2009), Bottom up Politics: An Agency-Centred Approach to Globalisation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), Civil Society and Transitions in the Western Balkans (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and Rethinking Reconciliation and Transitional Justice After Conflict (Routledge, 2018). Her work, which has been published in top political science and international relations journals and awarded with Honourable Mention of the Women's Forum Article Prize of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES), has informed policy-making at the EU, UN and in the UK.

Professor Kostovicova’s research was funded by a number of prestigious grants, including those by the Leverhulme Trust, MacArthur Foundation and Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), among others. She is currently directing a major research programme funded by the European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant, "Justice Interactions and Peacebuilding: From Static to Dynamic Discourses Across National, Ethnic, Gender and Age Groups".

Professor Kostovicova graduated from the University of Maine, U.S., and has a PhD and MPhil from the University of Cambridge, and an MA from the Central European University, Czech Republic. Before joining the LSE, she held Junior Research Fellowships at Wolfson College, Cambridge, and Linacre College, Oxford. Prior to pursuing her graduate studies, she worked as a journalist during the wars of Yugoslavia’s dissolution in 1990s, reporting for the CNN World Report and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, among others.

Expertise

• Transitional Justice
• Conflict Processes
• Civil Society
• Post-conflict Reconstruction
• Balkans

Since 2018, Professor Kostovicova has been leading a 5-year project funded by the prestigious ERC Consolidator Grant entitled ‘Justice Interactions and Peacebuilding: From Static to Dynamic Discourses across National, Ethnic, Gender and Age Groups (JUSTINT)’. To learn about the project visit: .

In 2015, she was awarded a Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust to investigate ‘Reconciliation Within and Across Divided Societies: Evidence from the Balkans’. She has recently completed research collaboration with King’s College London and University of the Arts London, on the project ‘Art and Reconciliation: Conflict, Culture and Community,’ funded through the Large Grant scheme of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) under the Conflict Theme of the Partnership for Conflict, Crime and Security Research (PaCCS) and through the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) (2016-2019), to learn about the project see: artreconciliation.org. In 2017-2018, Professor Kostovicova co-ordinated together with Dr Marsha Henry from the LSE’s Department of Gender Studies, the Bosnia and Herzegovina work-package of the ESRC Strategic Network on Gender Violence Across War and Peace, based at the LSE Centre for Women, Peace and Security.

Previously, Professor Kostovicova’s research was supported by a number of grants, including from the MacArthur Foundation, Volkswagen Foundation, the EU's 7th Framework Programme, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and Agence Française de Développement (AFD). She has also collaborated on numerous international research projects, such as the European Study Group on Europe's Security Capabilities, convened by Professor Mary Kaldor at the invitation of Javier Solana, former EU Foreign Policy Chief (2004-2008, reconvened in 2016); Friedrich Ebert Stiftung-funded project on local ownership ‘Exiting Conflict, Owning the Peace’; and was a member of an international team appointed by the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research, Braunschweig, Germany, to assess Kosovo Albanians history textbooks on behalf of the United Nations Interim Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) and the Education Ministry in Kosovo.

Professor Kostovicova is currently Programme Director of Programme Director, MSc Culture and Conflict in a Global Europe & LSE-Columbia Double Degree in European Politics, Conflict and Culture. She also held the role of Programme Director of MSc Culture and Conflict in a Global Europe from 2019 to 2023.

Alongside the directorship of the programme, Professor Kostovicova convenes a number of courses, including EU485 Post-Conflict Justice and Reconciliation in Europe and Beyond, EU4A9 European Politics, Conflict and Culture: LSE-Columbia European Seminar, EU410 Interdisciplinary Research Methods and Design, and EU499 Dissertation. Previously, Professor Kostovicova introduced and convened EU4A2 Globalisation, Conflict and Post-conflict Reconstruction. She has also convened and taught courses on comparative conflict analysis, global politics, global civil society and political science methods and research design at the LSE Government Department, where she was Programme Director of MSc Conflict Studies from 2014 to 2018.

Before joining LSE, she had contributed teaching at the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge.

She was awarded the Major Review Teaching Prize, and was a nominee for the LSESU’s Student-Led Teaching Excellence prize twice. In 2021, she was awarded the London School of Economics and Political Science’s Excellence in Education Award.

Her PhD students have worked on different aspects of conflict, transitional justice, and post-conflict reconstruction on a range of case-studies, including Bosnia-Herzegovina, Sierra Leone, Israel-Palestine, Crimea and Moldova.

Public Policy and public engagement

Professor Kostovicova maintains a keen interest in policy implications of her research on post-conflict reconstruction and reconciliation, and regularly engages in knowledge exchange with policy makers in the EU, the UK and the Balkans. Most recently, she has contributed to the House of Lords International Relations Committee Inquiry report ‘The UK and the future of the Western Balkans’ and the House of Commons Balkans Inquiry. She has written policy papers and reports for the European Union and the United Nations Development Programme. She authored many policy analysis pieces published by Oxford Analytica, Chaillot Papers, Strategic Comment (Institute of Strategic Studies), openDemocracy, Warreport, Transitions on-line, Development & Transition, etc. She has contributed comment for the UK and international media, including The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Observer, BBC World Service, BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio 5 Live, Associated Press, Public Radio International (US), and others. Also, she regularly blogs for LSE’s Department of Government blog and EUROPP.

Video & Audio

What we should have known (TEDx talk - TEDxLSE, March 2017)

Women in Conflict: violence, injustice and power (LSE Government 'Conflict Research Group' public lecture, April 2015)