In this seminar, Dr. Simic will speak about her recently published book, Lola’s War: Rape without Punishment (Springer, 2023). The book offers a subtle understanding of the Bosnian war by listening to the voice of Lola, a rural Bosnian woman who in the first two months of war had become a widow, displaced, unemployed, homeless, disabled and a sole caretaker of her nine-month-old baby, four year old daughter and six year old son with whom she was forcibly taken from her family home to detention and rape camp. In span of only few weeks, her whole life was torn into pieces and turned into nightmare. In Lola’s War Dr Simić tells extraordinary story of one woman and her three decades long fight for justice. She explores the meanings of transitional justice by using in-depth narrative of a woman, wartime rape survivor who came out the other side of a trial empty handed and with no justice in sight. Her perpetrator is still at large and she lives in continual fear that he will retaliate against her and her children for her role in his trial.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Olivera Simić is an Associate Professor with 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 Eastern and Western Europe, the USA and South America, before coming to Australia in 2006. She has published four monographs and eight co-edited collections, numerous book chapters, journal articles and personal narratives. They draw 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. 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).