Meet The Project Team
Barbora Holá, PhD
Barbora Holá is Senior Researcher at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR) and Associate Professor at the Department of Criminal Law and Criminology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She has an interdisciplinary focus and studies international criminal justice, societal reconstruction after atrocities, and the etiology of collective violence. Barbora has published extensively on these subjects and has presented as an expert at international conferences and universities in Europe, Australia, Africa and the Americas. Barbora co-edited the Perpetrators of International Crimes: Theories, Methods and Evidence (OUP, 2018), and the Oxford Handbook on Atrocity Crimes (OUP, 2022). Currently, she is working with Mark Drumbl on a book (under contract with OUP), which focuses on informing in communist Czechoslovakia.
Maartje Weerdesteijn, PhD
Maartje Weerdesteijn is Assistant Professor at the Department of Criminal Law and Criminology and researcher at the Center for International Criminal Justice. Maartje obtained a PhD from Tilburg University, Department of Criminal Law, a Master in International Crimes and Criminology from VU Amsterdam, and a Bachelor in European Studies. She used to work as a lecturer at the History of International Relations Department of Utrecht University and was a visiting scholar with Griffith University Australia at the Griffith Asia Institute in 2014. She is an interdisciplinary scholar, combining a historical and criminological outlook. She focuses on the role of dictators in the perpetration of mass atrocities and the manner in which the international community can potentially mitigate these crimes.
Gabriele Chlevickaite, PhD
Gabriele Chlevickaite is an Assistant Professor in Empirical and Normative Studies at the VU Amsterdam (Faculty of Law, Criminology and Criminal Law Department), where she conducts research into fact-finding in international criminal investigations. She is a board member of the Center for International Criminal Justice (www.cicj.org), an interdisciplinary research centre at the VU Amsterdam, and a fellow at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR) in Amsterdam, where she conducted her NWO Research Talent-funded PhD research in 2017-2021. In 2013-2017, Gabriele was an analysis assistant at the International Criminal Court, and in 2020-2021 a research assistant with the Independent Expert Review of the International Criminal Court.
Mirza Buljubašić, PhD
Mirza Buljubašić is a PostDoc at the project and a Senior Assistant of Criminology at the Faculty of Criminal Justice, Criminology and Security Studies at the University of Sarajevo. He received his PhD, MA, and BA in Criminology, MA in Criminal Law, and MA in Security Studies (all with honours) at the University of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He worked as a research consultant, research supervisor, and researcher at organizations that deal with the judiciary, security- and crime-related issues. His scholarly interests are developmental and life-course criminology, political violence and atrocity crimes, sentencing and punishment, transitional justice, and (intergenerational) right-wing radicalization/extremism. Within the project, Mirza is conducting two scoping literature reviews on intergenerational transmission of (war) narratives and the impact of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia on ex-Yugoslav local communities.
Margareta Blažević, MSc
Margareta Blažević is one of the two PhD candidates at the NSCR working on the VIDI project on intergenerational legacies of mass atrocities and transitional justice focusing on the case study of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Margareta is originally from Croatia but has finished both her Bachelor and Master's studies in the Netherlands. She majored in Psychology during her Bachelor studies in Politics, Psychology, Law and Economics (Universiteit van Amsterdam) after which she graduated from the International Crimes, Conflict, and Criminology Master's programme at the Vrije Universiteit. During her studies, most of her research activities focused on the former Yugoslav countries and the aftermath of Yugoslav Wars. Margareta was a researcher at the War Childhood Museum in Sarajevo and is currently also working on a project on Yugonostalgia within the Center for International Criminal Justice.
Lucie Pěntáková, MSc
Lucie Pěntáková is a Ph.D. candidate at NSCR with affiliation to the Criminal Law and Criminology department, Faculty of Law. She holds a Master's in Forensic and Legal Psychology from Erasmus University Rotterdam and a Bachelor's in Psychology from Maastricht University. She also worked as a psychology tutor at Erasmus University Rotterdam from 2021–2022. Together with her colleagues, she is currently working on the VIDI project, which focuses on the intergenerational transmission of legacies of mass atrocities and transitional justice. Specifically, her research focuses on the intergenerational transmission of repression legacies and the role of transitional justice mechanisms in the Czech Republic, where she also happens to come from.