For my fellow economic fans out there: tough luck today. Nothing about economics at all. Side, but related, note: if you have a queasy stomach, you may want to skip the paragraph starting with "TORTURE." We visited an exhibit today that centered on Communist Oppression in the early Yugoslav era (1940s). This was around the time that the Soviet Bloc was dominating much of eastern Europe, and the communist regimes ruled with minimal opposition. The point of this exhibit was to show that what little opposition existed was brutally shut down. While Stalinism was taking over Poland, Hungary, Romania, and other countries in the area, Yugoslavia was all about its leader, Josip Broz Tito. You'll notice in one photo - a map of eastern Europe - that most black marks incorporate Stalinism, or more blatantly, the ... read more

10 days left. That's it. We leave Belgrade on the morning of the 11th day from now. This Dialogue has absolutely flown by, and yet we've still got about a dozen meetings and day trips planned. Today we covered two more meetings, both of which I loved. One was Ivan Vujacic, who was the Serbian Ambassador to the US from 2002-2009, has served as an economics professor and has held almost every post but president in the Serbian Democratic Party. The other was Ana Trbović, who is a rising star in one of the local private universities and also spent a fair amount of time in Boston, including a PhD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. I mostly loved these meetings because, at long last, economics was a focal point. As ... read more

Let me preface this blog post by noting one thing: unlike Bosnia, Serbia actually functions as a unified country. Granted, this makes sense because, unlike Bosnia, Serbia mainly consists of just Serbs, while Bosnia includes Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks. Note that Serbs are Orthodox Christians, Croats Catholic, and Bosniaks Muslim. As such, the tensions are more than just ethnic differences; they are deeply rooted in religious conflicts. The reason it's necessary to note that was our group activity today. We visited the a Serbian Court, where we met with representatives of the Office of the War Crimes Prosecutor. This court was established to prosecute those who committed war crimes during the Yugoslav wars that plagued the area in the early 1990s. However, it was interesting to follow and learn about because they have issues with some ... read more

Apparently air conditioning is only partially invented here. I know it exists, because I've felt it in a few buildings and rooms. But I'm pretty sure it doesn't exist in my bedroom, and I'm quite sure it doesn't exist in the room that our meeting today was in. At a guess, I'd put the temperature there at somewhere around 412 degrees centigrade, and the humidity around 136%. Regardless, it was an interesting meeting. The Center for Applied Non-Violent Action and Strategies does this most years and they seem to have an idea of how to do it. They walked us through how non-violent action works (and how much better than violent action it is, in terms of results and number of casualties), then had us start working on our own, hypothetical non-violent campaigns. My team chose ... read more

Hello, Belgrade! Since I promised several of you readers that I would post on my blog daily, I will stick to that promise. Here's my blog post for today: Nothing happened. The end. But actually, though. We left the hotel in Banja Lukaat 10:30and sat on the bus (or got off for momentary pit stops) until about 6. Technically I can say I've been to Croatia now. If you want to count getting out at a rest area and stretching my legs on my way through as "going to Croatia." To be honest, we could have been in Ohio. Cornfields and flatland all around. Regardless, Belgrade is an interesting city to be in. It's much more industrialized than any of the other cities we've hit. It actually honestly looks like it's stuck in the 1990s...lots of ... read more