Institute for Human Sciences

Radislav Krstic, General of the Republika Srpska army and Deputy Commander of Drina Corps, was the first war criminal sentenced for genocide by the ICTY. He was sentenced to 46 years of prison for ordering the deaths of over seven thousand Muslim men were executed, in the UN safe area of Srebrenica, between 13 and 19 July 1995, while 30,000 people were forcibly deported. Slavenka Drakulic witnessed the trial and traces Krstic’s biography.

Contrary to other former socialist Central and Eastern European countries, Belarus has hardly undergone any cultural and economic changes and remains cut off from the international arena. At the core of this problem, argues Nelly Bekus-Goncharova, is the Belarusian media landscape which proves incapable of creating an integrated informational space. State media and independent mass media remain locked in self-absorbed and separate discourses, neither of which provide a projection of what is really happening in Belarus. Can this deadlock be overcome?

Krysztof Pomian examines European attitudes towards Poland and Poland’s attitudes towards the European Union. He uncovers startling similarities in the rhetoric used by the European Left and the Polish Right in their arguments against the enlargement.

Joanna Tokarska-Bakir investigates the defence mechanisms triggered by the European past: on the one hand the Holocaust guilt-complex and on the other the language historians use to talk about it.