Our article, "Enemy of Justice? Secrecy in Domestic War Crimes Trials in Serbia", co-authored w @denisakost.bsky.social & Timothy William Waters, is now available in Serbian 🇷🇸. Published by Forum za bezbednost i demokratiju (FBD) in its “Vidici i Putokazi” series: fbd.org.rs/images/pdfs/...

If you are interested in Political Comms in autocracies: New piece by Nikita Khokhlov and Alexander Baturo: elites simplify speech in protest-prone, low-support regions—often richer & more educated—and dial complexity down when contexts shift. Clear communicators are likelier to be promoted.

tickets: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/department...

Next Friday (24 Oct) at 2pm I’ll present work from my PhD + new research at LSE’s Department of Methodology — in person 📍 Interested in using text-as-data to study media (and beyond)? I’ll focus on research design. 🎟️ Few tickets left

🇷🇸🇺🇦 @denisakost.bsky.social and @lanabi.bsky.social have published a new JUSTINT paper in East European Politics, which analyses cross border dynamics of war crimes denial between Serbia and Ukraine. Discover it below👇 www.lse.ac.uk/european-ins...

💡 Sign up for our next Seminar Series, with @lanabi.bsky.social 📚 "Authoritarian Communication at Scale: What Text-as-Data Reveals about Russia" 📆 Friday 24 Oct 🕐 2 - 3pm Sign up today➡️ www.eventbrite.com/e/department...

Gratitude 🙏

free access www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

New paper 🚨 “Vicarious denial: war crimes & online deliberation in Serbia” 🇷🇸 with @denisakost.bsky.social We scrape 4 news sites + reader comments and blend text-as-data (keywords; neg. binomial/logistic; BERTopic/SBERT) with critical discourse analysis to track on-topic debate & denial.

If you’re at #APSA2025 and interested in Transitional Justice, Reconciliation, and/or the Balkans, I’m presenting two chapters from our book project with @denisakost.bsky.social and Ivor Sokolic. Come by! @apsa.bsky.social #APSA2025

NEW ARTICLE📢 We show how redactions in war crimes judgements obstruct transparency, prevent reckoning with past violence & highlight limits of digital data for quant analysis in TJ w/ @lanabi.bsky.social T.W.Waters @erc.europa.eu @lse-ei.bsky.social @journalgenocide.bsky.social tinyurl.com/2h2b6x79

On Aug. 28, we published open access research article "Enemy of Justice? Secrecy in Domestic War Crimes Trials in Serbia" by @lanabi.bsky.social, @denisakost.bsky.social and Timothy William Waters. Read the full article: tinyurl.com/h27fecv2

Today is my last day at @lse-ei.bsky.social 🌍✨ Grateful to all collaborators and the amazing team at LSE EI and beyond for this journey 🙏🤝💡 From next week, I’ll be an Advanced Quant Fellow at @lsemethodology.bsky.social 📊🔍 and teaching at @lseir.bsky.social 🎓📚 So excited! 🚀

🙏 Thanks for feedback & support to Carles Torne, @tenaprelec.bsky.social , @grabaranowska.bsky.social, Jelena Grujic Zindovic, anonymous reviewers & @dirkmoses.bsky.social 👉 doi.org/10.1080/1462...

🚨⚖️🔍 New paper in Journal of Genocide Research with @denisakost.bsky.social & Timothy Waters we studied secrecy in Serbia’s war crimes trials. 📑Corpus of 164 judgements (1999–2019). Tried OCR+quant methods, but chaotic redactions made it impossible. So we wrote a descriptive, mixed-methods paper

New in Advance Articles: Text-as-Data Methods to Study Mass-Media Manipulations in Autocracies by Lanabi La Lova (@lanabi.bsky.social) doi.org/10.1525/cpcs...

🚨📢 New article out! "Text-as-Data Methods to Study Mass-Media Manipulations in Autocracies" (AKA my PhD Thesis intro revisited :) Huge thanks to Max Alyukov, @gulnazsharaf.bsky.social, Tomila Lankina, @jpaulgoode.bsky.social, @ktertytchnaya.bsky.social & anon rev for advice & support 🙏

We thank colleagues for their interest in & comments on our JUSTINT @erc.europa.eu research on online memorialisation of Srebrenica genocide w/ @lanabi.bsky.social & Ivor Sokolic at a special 'Why Remember?' conference in Sarajevo in memory of Paul Lowe @lse-ei.bsky.social

Mearsheimer's logic on great power war “makes sense” in a vacuum — a clean theory built in safe offices. But it erases people. Russia is not just a state actor; it's a repressive system. Who is this power for? IR theory that ignores domestic politics explains everything and nothing.

📢 If you're at #ISA2025, don't miss our panel WD20: Methods and Marginalization in Transitional Justice and Beyond 🕓 Wednesday, 4:00 PM - 5:45 PM. Join us for a critical discussion on methodology, justice, and inclusion!

📢 Excited to share our new policy paper with AspenGermany: Legislative Debates and Transitional Justice in the Western Balkans 🇦🇱🇧🇦🇭🇷🇽🇰🇲🇪🇲🇰🇷🇸

This lexical strategy helps downplay state responsibility and influence public perceptions of past events.

📊 Are domestic war crimes trials biased? We use Text as Data methods, using LIWC to look at judicial decisions from Serbia (1999–2019). We find conflict actor bias—paramilitary crimes are described in longer, more graphic detail, while state actors' crimes receive shorter, more neutral accounts.

NEW ARTICLE: Analysing the verdicts and the texts of judgements, we find that the state shifts responsibility away from state forces to paramilitaries in Serbian war crimes trials, with Ivor Sokolic @lanabi.bsky.social @sanjavico.bsky.social @ercresearch.bsky.social tinyurl.com/jx39z792