COST Action K-Peritia Meeting and Conference Held in Dubrovnik

Following editions in Oxford, Paris, Istanbul, Tirana, and Venice, the conference of the COST Action K-Peritia was held on June 16, 2026, at the Palace of the Dubrovnik Summer Festival. The conference was titled "Cultural Expertise in Post-Communist Legal Regimes" and brought together researchers from France, the United Kingdom, Albania, Hungary, Turkey, Montenegro, Cyprus, and Moldova.
 

The conference theme was proposed by Assistant Professor Miriam Mary Brgles, PhD, who delivered a plenary lecture titled "Cultural Expertise in the Context of Dual Social Trauma: A Case Study from the Republic of Croatia." In the theoretical part of her presentation, drawing on Piotr Sztompka's theory of social trauma and Jeffrey C. Alexander's cultural trauma, Assistant Professor Brgles presented her finding that a dual trauma occurred in the Republic of Croatia during the 1990s because the fall of communism coincided with the outbreak of the Homeland War.
 

Furthermore, she analyzed two final court judgments to which cultural expertise could contribute. The first concerned a citizen's display of the coat of arms starting with a first white field, while the second focused on the 1995 war crime of rocketing Zagreb and Karlovac. By presenting existing extrajudicial cultural expertise—such as the Declaration of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts (HAZU) on the Historical Croatian Coat of Arms and the Zagreb Rocketing Memorial Center—she demonstrated the possibilities and scope for the academic community to draft cultural expertise for judicial practice, as well as the role of the local community participating in the creation of informal knowledge or oral history.

In her presentation, she also mentioned the work of the Council for Facing the Consequences of the Rule of Non-Democratic Regimes, including the dissenting opinions of CUC Rector Professor Željko Tanjić and Professor Vanja-Ivan Savić. Professor Dina Hadad from Paris Nanterre University led the discussion and provided a commentary on the plenary presentation. Some of the participants visited Mount Srđ and the Museum of the Homeland War. The papers from the conference will be published in English in an open-access publication.