The Fragile Peace - 30 Years After the Dayton Peace Agreement

Olivera Simić is a professor at the Griffith Law School, a feminist, and a human rights activist. Dr Simić was born in the former Yugoslavia and lived through the Yugoslav Wars (1991-1999). She was nineteen years old, studying the first year of a law degree in Bosnia and Herzegovina, when the Bosnian War broke out in 1992. Initially, as a refugee and later as a migrant, Dr Simić lived and studied in Europe, the USA, and South America before coming to Australia in 2006. In 2014, Dr Simić published a memoir based on her experiences with war in Bosnia titled "Surviving Peace: a political memoir" (Spinifex).
She has published five monographs and eight co-edited collections, as well as numerous book chapters, journal articles, and personal narratives.

Her writing has appeared in online media outlets such as The Conversation, Griffith Review, the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, and Lawyers Weekly. Her non-fiction work draws on hundreds of interviews with victims, perpetrators and bystanders of the wars. The stories of people who struggle with post-war trauma and seek some form of justice for crimes they survived, particularly women, are at the heart of Dr Simić’s work. Her book, Lola's War: Rape Without Punishment, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2023 and was shortlisted for the Australian Legal Research Book Award 2024. Her forthcoming book, Madam War Criminal: Biljana Plavsic, Serbia's Iron Lady, will be published by Hurst in 2025.
Dr Simić was a nominee for the Penny Pether Prize for Scholarship in Law, Literature and the Humanities, and won the Peace Women Award from Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF, Australian branch).