Laura Silber is the Vice President for Advocacy and Communications at the Open Society Foundations, where she runs the Communications department and oversees advocacy strategy and public identity. [1] Since 2007 she has been an adjunct professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. [2]
Prior to joining the Open Society Foundations in 2000, Silber was a contributing writer at Talk magazine. She covered the United Nations for the Financial Times from 1997-99. She was also a visiting scholar at the Remarque Institute at New York University. From 1990-1997, she was the Balkans correspondent for the Financial Times and covered Yugoslavia's violent disintegration.
She is the co-author, with Allan Little, of Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation (published as The Death of Yugoslavia outside of the United States), which was selected for the New York Times notable book list. She was a consultant to the accompanying 1995 BBC television documentary series, which won the BAFTA, duPont Gold Baton, and Peabody Award. [3]
The documentary indicted the Serbian and Croatian leadership, revealed their virulent nationalism, and deplored the lack of international intervention. [4] She has contributed to a wide range of publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and The New York Review of Books.
Silber was a Fulbright Scholar in Yugoslavia and received a Master of International Affairs from Columbia University and a B.A. from Carleton College. [5] She lives in New York with her family.
Open Society Foundations (OSF), formerly the Open Society Institute, is a grantmaking network founded by business magnate George Soros. Open Society Foundations financially support civil society groups around the world, with a stated aim of advancing justice, education, public health and independent media. The group's name is inspired by Karl Popper's 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies.
Morton H. Halperin is a longtime expert on U.S. foreign policy, arms control, civil liberties, and the workings of bureaucracies.
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The Death of Yugoslavia is a BBC documentary series first broadcast in 1995, and it is also the title of a BBC book by Allan Little and Laura Silber that accompanies the series. It covers the collapse of Yugoslavia, the subsequent wars and the signing of the final peace accords. It uses a combination of archived footage interspersed with interviews with most of the main players in the conflict, including Slobodan Milošević, Radovan Karadžić, Franjo Tuđman and Alija Izetbegović, as well as members of the International political community, who were active in the various peace initiatives.
Anne-Marie Slaughter is an American international lawyer, foreign policy analyst, political scientist and public commentator. From 2002 to 2009, she was the Dean of Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Bert G. Kerstetter '66 University Professor of Politics and International Affairs. Slaughter was the first woman to serve as the Director of Policy Planning for the U.S. State Department from January 2009 until February 2011 under U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She is a former president of the American Society of International Law and the current President and CEO of New America.
The School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University (SIPA) is the international affairs and public policy school of Columbia University, a private Ivy League university located in Morningside Heights, Manhattan, New York City.
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Bruce Shapiro is an American journalist, commentator and author. He is executive director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, a resource center and think tank for journalists who cover violence, conflict and tragedy, based at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. In 2014 he received the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies Public Advocacy Award recognizing "outstanding and fundamental contributions to the social understanding of trauma."
Joan Edelman Spero is a Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, where she researches and writes about international philanthropy and its role in the global system. From 2009 to 2010, Ms. Spero was a Visiting Scholar at the Foundation Center, where she conducted research on the role of American private foundations in U.S. foreign policy and in the global system.
Chuck Sudetic is a former writer and journalist from the United States whose work focused mainly on the lands and peoples of the now-defunct country of Yugoslavia and included books and articles on the Srebrenica massacre of 1995, international war-crimes prosecution efforts after the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s, and life from the fifth century B.C. to the present day in and around what is now the seaside town of Dubrovnik. Sudetic also wrote on the Roma of Europe, mass rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and crime in New York City.
Aryeh Neier is an American human rights activist who co-founded Human Rights Watch, served as the president of George Soros's Open Society Institute philanthropy network from 1993 to 2012, had been National Director of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1970 to 1978, and he was also involved with the creation of the group SDS by being directly involved in the group SLID's renaming.
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Bogdan Denitch was an American sociologist of Yugoslav origin. He was a leading authority on the political sociology of the former Yugoslavia, and served as professor at the City University of New York (CUNY) from 1973 until his retirement in 1994. Denitch was active in democratic left politics throughout his life, joining the Young People's Socialist League at age 18, and later co-founding the Democratic Socialists of America. From 1983 through 2004 he organized the annual Socialist Scholars Conference in New York. Since the 1990s he has been an advocate for human rights and an opponent of nationalism in the former Yugoslavia.
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An independence referendum was held in Bosnia and Herzegovina between 29 February and 1 March 1992, following the first free elections of 1990 and the rise of ethnic tensions that eventually led to the breakup of Yugoslavia. Independence was strongly favored by Bosniak and Bosnian Croat voters while Bosnian Serbs boycotted the referendum or were prevented from participating by Bosnian Serb authorities.
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