Olivera Simic

Olivera holds LLB from Nis University’s Law School (Serbia), LLM from Essex University (UK), MA from UN University for Peace (Costa Rica) and a PhD from Melbourne Law School. Her research is in the field of transitional justice, international law, gender and crime. Olivera has published numerous articles in scholarly journals, book chapters and books. In 2017, with a group of transitional justice experts, she published the first textbook in transitional justice, “An Introduction to Transitional Justice” (Routledge) which has been revised and updated for the second edition published in 2020. Her latest monograph "Silent Victims of Wartime Sexual Violence" has been published by Routledge in 2018. This book explores the silence surrounding women’s experiences of wartime sexual violence within academic, legal and public discourses. Olivera argues that the international criminal law and feminist legal discourse on wartime sexual violence can construct a problematic victim hierarchy that excludes and misrecognises certain women’s experiences of sexual violence during and after armed conflict. After working for many years with survivors of mass atrocities, Olivera has also being working on a project that looks at what happens to individuals who served their sentence for war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanities.Olivera is currently writing a monograph about the only woman prosecuted before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Biljana Plavšić.