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2021-2022 marks the 10th year of the AHDA fellowship program. Since 2012, the fellowship has hosted at least 107 fellows who represent over 48 countries and territories. Below please find information regarding the professional interests and accomplishments of fellows and alumni. While at Columbia, fellows design individual projects that address some aspect of a history of gross human rights violations in their society, country, and/or region.
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Click here to read about more about the work of our Fellows.
Bosch Foundation Fellow
Nora Ahmetaj is a founder and director of the Centre for Research, Documentation and Publication (CRDP), which was established in 2010. Its foundation was inspired by a profound need to seek transitional justice, reconciliation and right to truth for victims and former adversaries of the Kosovo conflict. The mission of CRDP is to develop mechanisms related to Dealing with the Past through research, documentation, publication and advocacy. In some ways the work of CRDP came out of Ms. Ahmetaj’s experience during the armed conflict in Kosovo, when she conducted investigations of war crimes and crimes against humanity for the Humanitarian Law Centre. Ms. Ahmetaj’s work at CRDP includes developing projects in line with the mission and vision of the organization, as well as focusing on the organization’s strategic initiatives. Her responsibilities include communication, status reporting, risk management (contingency planning), fundraising, networking, lecturing and advocacy.
Prior to working at CRDP, Ms. Ahmetaj was engaged as a consultant for the European Commission, and worked for a variety of international organizations such as HLC, UNDP, ICG, AI and HRW. From 2010-2012 Ms. Ahmetaj was a member of the Regional Coordination Council of Coalition for Regional Truth Commission (RECOM) for war crimes committed during the years 1991-2001 in Former Yugoslavia. Her specialization throughout her career has been human rights, peace and conflict transformation, and transitional justice. In terms of her education, Ms. Ahmetaj was trained in human rights and international relations at Harvard’s Kennedy School, the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy which she attended in 2000. She earned an MA in Peace and Conflict Transformation Studies from the University of Tromsø, Norway in 2005, and in 2008 she attended a Tufts University workshop on Solving Non-violent Conflicts. In 2010, she was selected to attend an Advanced Learning Course for Professionals on Dealing with the Past in Switzerland. As an AHDA fellow, Ms. Ahmetaj will take up issues related to Dealing with the Past: she will develop a project that explores conceptual and practical applications regarding what reconciliation means for stakeholders within the context of Kosovo and the Western Balkans.
Dr. Niđara Ahmetašević, is an independent scholar who works in the areas of democratization and media development in post conflict societies, transitional justice, the process of facing the past, media and political propaganda, and human rights. She has had a long career as a journalist working for various local, regional and international media on human rights, war crimes, and international affairs. Her work has been published in The Observer, The Independent on Sunday, the International Justice Tribune, and Balkan Insight (among others). In 2013, together with two colleagues, Dr. Ahmetašević established the Open University Sarajevo, a platform for public discussions, social, artistic and political alternatives, and informal education.
Dr. Ahmetašević received her PhD from the University of Graz, Austria in the Program on Diversity Management and Governance. She holds an MA in Human Rights and Democratization in Southeast Europe from the University of Sarajevo/University of Bologna. Aside from the numerous awards she has received in Bosnia and internationally for her journalistic work, Dr. Ahmetašević has been recognized with a number of fellowships and academic awards, including the Chevening Scholarship, the Ron Brown Fellowship for Young Professionals, and the UNICEF Keizo Obuchi award. Dr. Ahmetašević has an extensive list of online publications, and her article “Media and Transitional Justice: Reporting on ICTY War Crimes Trials in Serbia,” appeared in the printed volume, Beyond Outreach: Transitional Justice, Culture and Society (New York: ICTJ, 2013). As an AHDA fellow, Dr. Ahmetašević is interested in employing oral history methods to examine the stories of people who were sentenced for war crimes they committed in Bosnia and Croatia, and who returned to cities where their victims, as well as families and friends, live. There are few studies that address the relationship among citizens of individual communities where perpetrators have been reintegrated into Bosnian and Croatian society, and this project will seek to open this field for further investigation of topics such as victim acknowledgement, accountability for past actions/atrocities, and the differing perceptions of the past that often continue to divide communities.
Margarita Akhvlediani started working as a journalist in the late 1980s, at age 16, and she has been working ever since as a journalist, editor and producer at local and international newspapers, radio and TV stations ever since. She has worked in the field of journalism through several wars and civil confrontations, and in 2009, she co-founded the Go Group Media/ Eyewitness Studio, where she currently serves as the organization’s director and editor-in-chief. In this position she is responsible for strategic development of the organization; coordination of its cross-Caucasus network of journalists; research within the organizations political analysis department as well as other responsibilities relating to reporting, media production, and education. In these different capacities, Ms. Akhvlediani seeks to contribute to the mission of Go Group Media in transforming the conflicts in Georgia and the South Caucuses by enhancing the quality of media and citizen journalism throughout the region.
Before founding Go Group Media, Ms. Akhvlediani served as the Caucasus Programme Director for the London-based Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR), where she was responsible for managing and training journalists in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and the North Caucasian regions of Russia. For several years, she has also taught courses on News Reporting, Conflict Reporting and Media Management to graduate students at the Georgian Institute of Public Affairs. In 2011, Margarita earned an MA in Political Philosophy, from the University of York. Ms. Akhvlediani was elected a member of the Board of Directors of the Dart Society at the Columbia University and was a Knight fellow at Stanford University. Her publications include a chapter on the information war between Georgian and Russian media during the August 2008 war, which appeared in Crisis in the Caucasus. Russia, Georgia and the West published in 2009.
Ms. Akhvlediani’s professional interests in the social and political aspects of post-Soviet history, the challenges and issues relating to self-determination in the region, and the way ordinary people are affected by this history are components that continue to define her work. As an AHDA fellow, Ms. Akhvlediani seeks to develop an oral history project that focuses on people trapped in the aftermath of violent conflict. By gathering eyewitness stories from different kinds of witnesses and former adversaries, she hopes that participants in the project will better understand and empathize with the multiplicity of perspectives that exist about the memory of violence, particularly in thinking of those who for years they regarded as enemies.
