Founder & President

Velma is a researcher, journalist, peacebuilding expert, and human rights defender from Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Velma has around 20 years of work experience and is currently, the Founder and President of the Post-Conflict Research Center and Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Balkan Diskurs.

Velma holds an MA Degree in Political Science from the University of Sarajevo. At the beginning of her career, she worked for five years as a researcher at the Institute for Research of Crimes against Humanity and International Law in Sarajevo, primarily focusing on investigating the crime of genocide and other mass atrocities.

Velma is a journalist, trained at the BBC Reporting School. As a journalist at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) in London and The Hague, Velma spent eight years reporting on war crimes trials and investigating transitional justice processes in the former Yugoslavia. Additionally, she spent three years working as a court reporter at the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network and Association of Court Reporters in Bosnia and Herzegovina, covering court procedures at the local and national levels.

As a researcher and producer, Velma has worked on numerous publications and films about the 1992-1995 Bosnian war, including Uspomene 677, Ordinary Heroes, In the Land of Blood and Honey by Angelina Jolie, I Came to Testify and War Redefined from the PBS series Women, War & Peace.

From 2012 to 2019, she served as the Project Manager of the WARM Foundation in Bosnia and Herzegovina. During this time, Velma led the development and design of the Foundation’s work and the annual Festival on contemporary conflicts in Sarajevo bringing together more than 1500 attendees from the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas.

Velma is a Columbia University fellow, having attended the Alliance for Historical Dialogue and Accountability Fellowship Program. In addition, she is a fellow of the Global Post’s GroundTruth Project. Since August 2024, Velma is the Leonard and Sophie Davis Genocide Prevention Fellow in the Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Velma and PCRC were awarded the Intercultural Innovation Award by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) and the BMW Group. Velma is mentee of the Vital Voices’ Global Ambassadors Program and is currently the only Bosnian to be a part of the VV100 – a group of the 100 most engaged and visionary women within the Vital Voices Global Leadership Network. Most recently, PCRC and Velma have been chosen as Peace Ambassadors by the Centre for Peace Studies Sri Lanka. Velma is the first and only person from Bosnia and Western Balkans to be selected for this honorable position. Read more about Velma’s work here.