Alma Begičević is a social science and law scholar with more than twenty years of experience connecting knowledge, policy, and practice to strengthen rights-based outcomes for vulnerable individuals, groups, and communities. A sociologist of law, she integrates micro and macro-level perspectives to address complex social, legal, and governance challenges — bringing systems-level analysis and interdisciplinary research expertise to work in transitional justice, human rights, democracy building, and institutional reform. She holds a PhD and is currently Adjunct Professor in the Department of Sociology at Loyola University Chicago.
Her career spans the full arc of the field she studies — from legislative and policy review to programme design, from qualitative research to strategic planning, monitoring, evaluation and learning. She has worked across diverse and often fractured post-conflict environments, engaging with the questions these societies generate most acutely: what accountability requires, what institutions owe to those they have failed, and whether democratic governance can be reconstructed in societies whose democratic foundations were destroyed before they were fully built.
Democratic accountability does not begin when institutions function well — it begins when they are made to answer for the moments they did not.
At TDE Institute, Begičević is a Research Associate within the Borders, Bodies and Democracy line of inquiry. Her work examines democratic accountability, transitional justice, and the politics of post-conflict reconstruction — interrogating what democracy owes to those who survive organised violence, and how accountability is constructed, deferred, or denied in the societies democracy claims to rebuild.
Academic PositionAdjunct Professor, Department of Sociology, Loyola University Chicago. Research areas: peace, war, social conflict and repair, transitional justice, human rights, and democratic governance.