Dr Kušić previously worked as a lecturer at the University of Bristol and led independent postdoctoral projects at Aberystwyth University, the University of Bremen, and the University of Vienna, where she also completed her Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions postdoctoral project. She is continuously committed to disciplinary development of political science and international relations, as well as to academic citizenship. She co-led the BISA South East Europe Working Group from 2020 to 2024 and co-organized numerous workshops, symposia, conference panels, and round tables dedicated to international relations in and from Southeast Europe. You can find more information about her work at her personal website.

Education

She earned an MA in International Relations and European Studies at Central European University and a PhD in International Politics at Aberystwyth University in Wales (UK). She held postdoctoral positions at CAS SEE, as well as in Aberystwyth, Bremen, and Vienna. She continues to develop her research, teaching, and administrative profile through further education and professional training.

Areas of expertise

• international political ecologies of land and landscapes
• political ecologies of Southeast Europe
• international interventions in state-building and peacebuilding
• interpretive and fieldwork-based methods
• postcolonial and decolonial thought in Southeast Europe

Methodological expertise

• field-based and reflexive methodologies (unstructured interviews, ethnography)
• archival methodologies
• participatory mapping

Courses at UniRi (academic year 2025/2026)

• Social Theory and International Relations (Micro-qualification in Political Transformations)
• International Political Sociology (Micro-qualification in Political Transformations)
• International Politics of the Anthropocene (Micro-qualification in Political Transformations)
• Guest lectures at FFRI and the Work and Wellbeing micro-qualification

Courses before joining UniRI

• Social Theory and International Relations (MAIR, Universität Bremen, 2023)
• Development Studies (SPAIS, University of Bristol, 2019)
• Global Justice (SPAIS, University of Bristol, 2019)
• Gender and Development (SPAIS, University of Bristol, 2019)
• Multiculturalism in Policy and Practice (Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University, 2018)
• International Politics and Non-Western Worlds, with Prof. Mustapha Pasha (Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University, 2017)

Publications

Monographs and edited books

• Grounding IR: The Land Question in International Politics (co-editor, Global Studies Quarterly, 2026)
• Subject beyond Intervention: Politics of Improvement in Serbia (University of Michigan Press, 2025)
• International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity, 6th edition (co-editor, OUP, 2024)
• Fieldwork as Failure: Living and Knowing in the Field of International Relations (co-editor, E-IR, 2020)
• Decolonial Theory and Practice in Southeast Europe (co-editor, dVERSIA, 2019)

Original scholarly articles

• “International Politics from the Dinaric Karst: Landscapes of States and Empires” (2026)
• “Grounding International Relations: Introduction to the Special Forum” (2026)
• “The Land at the Bottom of the Lake: Development through Nature in Yugoslav (Post-)Socialism” (2025)
• “Rethinking international intervention through coeval engagement: Non-formal youth education and the politics of improvement” (2025; online first 2023)
• “Forum: Critical Ethnography” (with multiple authors, 2024)
• “Upholding Hierarchies of Knowledge Production: Mundane Obstacles to Global International Relations” (with multiple authors, 2024)
• “Studying human-soil relations in Southeast Europe” (2023)
• “Balkan subjects in intervention literature: The politics of overrepresentation and reconstruction” (2021)
• “From dialogue to practice: Pathways towards decoloniality in Southeast Europe” (2019)
• Book chapters
• “The Politics of Knowing, Depicting, and Conducting War in The Sparrow and Children of God” (forthcoming)
• “No alternative but Europeanisation: slow violence and critical imaginaries in/from/with South East Europe” (2025)
• “Critical Theories” (2024)
• “What’s in a land grab? Post-socialist privatisations and global markets in South East Europe” (2024)
• “Land politics and conflict” (2022)
• “I Don’t Know What to do with Myself: ‘I’ as a tool, a voice, and an object in writing” (2020)
• “Fieldwork, Failure, IR” (2020)
• “Interpretation by proxy? Interpretive fieldwork with local associates in areas of restricted research access” (2020)