Dr. Øyvind Hvenekilde Seim

Øyvind Hvenekilde Seim holds a PhD in history from the University of Vienna (2023). His dissertation has the title The Road to War in the Bosnian Municipality of Kotor Varoš in 1992 – A Microhistory. He has MA/BA-similar Cand.Philol. and Cand.Mag. degrees from the University of Bergen as well as university studies in Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Jerusalem.

 

 

 

 

 

Hvenekilde Seim’s interdisciplinary research profile and main competences are:

  • 19th century Habsburg studies: the Military Border (Militärgrenze) in Croatia-Slavonia
  • 19th and 20th century nationalism in Eastern Europe
  • Communist Yugoslavia and the dissolution processes of Yugoslavia in the 1980-90s
  • Military history and conflict studies: World War 2, Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Syria in the 2010s, Ukraine from 2014, and ethnic conflict in Myanmar
  • Contemporary politics and transformation processes in South Eastern Europe
  • Election observation and election analysis, especially in the Eastern OSCE area
  • Oral history, memory studies, microhistory, historical anthropology, political history

Hvenekilde Seim regularly undertakes monitoring projects and consulting as an election and democratization expert, political analyst, and policy consultant.

He is currently continuing his research on the pre-war nationalist mobilization and failed democratization in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1990-92. Also, he is preparing studies on post-war Bosnia’s election patterns, challenging reintegration, hampered reconciliation, and institutional-political dysfunctionality. In a new project he seeks to explore these problems from the aspect of the identity cleavages produced by memory politics in Bosnia and Herzegovina after the war, memory battles that have been functioning as “a continuation of war by other means” – an inversion of Clausewitz’s doctrine.