Distributed March 9, 2001
For Immediate Release
News Service Contact: Mark Nickel



Watson Directors Series

Balkan experts to speak on ‘The Downfall of the Milosevic Regime’

Misha Glenny and Aleksa Djilas, two historians and expert commentators on the Balkans, will deliver a joint presentation titled “The Downfall of the Milosevic Regime and Its Aftermath” at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 14, 2001, in the Salomon Center for Teaching. Their presentation is part of the Watson Institute’s Directors Lecture Series.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Two years after the NATO bombing of Serbia and the start of peacekeeping operations in the region, two renowned historians and commentators will visit Brown University to discuss the aftermath of the Milosevic regime.

Misha Glenny and Aleksa Djilas, both eyewitnesses to the events leading up to the bombing, will deliver a joint presentation titled “The Downfall of the Milosevic Regime and Its Aftermath” at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 14, 2001, in the Salomon Center for Teaching, located on The College Green. Their presentation, which is open to the public without charge, is part of the Directors Lecture Series, sponsored by the Thomas J. Watson Jr. Institute for International Studies at Brown University.

Editors: Glenny and Djilas will have some time available for interviews earlier in the day. Contact the Brown News Service for details.

Djilas lives in Belgrade and is a well-known commentator on Balkan politics. He is the son of Milovan Djilas, a famous Yugoslav communist dissident. Djilas is the author of The Contested Country: Yugoslav Unity and Communist Revolution, 1991-1953, which describes the rise of communism in the region. Glenny was the BBC’s East Europe correspondent in the early 1990s and now contributes to the New York Review. He was the Times correspondent in Belgrade at the time of Milosevic’s fall and reported on that event for National Public Radio. Both men are well known in the academic and dissident communities.

The Watson Institute’s Directors Lecture Series on Contemporary International Affairs brings leading intellectuals to campus to discuss compelling global issues. Previous lecturers in the Directors Series this year have included author and journalist Michael Ignatieff, who discussed his recent work, Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond; author Frances FitzGerald, who spoke on “Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War,” and political philosopher Pierre Hassner, who spoke on “The New Dynamics of Violence: Beyond War and Totalitarianism.”

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