“Are you glad to be back in Sarajevo?” I ask. “Oh yeah!” she exclaims, lighting up with excitement. The 22 of November 2017 marks an extraordinary day for Bosnia and Herzegovina: the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) finds Ratko Mladić guilty on 10 of 11 charges for crimes committed during the armed conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1992-1995. It is on this momentous day that I am also scheduled to interview Tanya Domi, an accomplished and well-respected Adjunct Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and faculty affiliate of the Harriman Institute in New York. As I push open the doors to London Café, a warm rush of air, a friendly face, and to my surprise, a relatively empty room greets me. This is my first visit to the café; it’s cozy, and the large windowpanes are charming. I find a seat in the back by the radiator and take out the gadgets I need for the interview. I check my phone and load Reuters and Balkan Insight in an effort to locate a live stream of the Mladić verdict. My phone begins buzzing frantically, and when I look up at my laptop, there it is: “The Guardian: former Bosnian Serb army commander Ratko Mladić sentenced to life imprisonment convicted of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity”. His convictions include ‘murder, terror and unlawful attacks on civilians in Sarajevo; and for genocide and persecution, extermination, murder, and the inhumane act of forcible transfer in the area of Srebrenica in 1995’. This signifies the last trial judgment delivered by the ICTY before the completion of its mandate on 31 December 2017. Tanya soon arrives and, after finishing her statement on the verdict for Reuters, our interview begins. “Are you glad to be back in Sarajevo?” I ask. “Oh yeah!” she exclaims, lighting up with excitement. At first, she continues in Bosnian, but then becomes aware of my humble linguistic skills and kindly translates for me, “My heart is full for Sarajevo.” Originally from Indiana, Domi informs me that she is a third generation Albanian-American, whose grandmother immigrated to the United States in 1928. Although she has always had an intrinsic “regional connection”, it was after spending 15 years in the United States Army when her interest in the Balkans officially began. Before developing her passion for all things Balkan, Tanya studied political science and journalism at Central Michigan University and later obtained a Master of Arts in Human Rights at Columbia University. She asserts a particular interest in the areas of transitional justice, post-conflict and democratic development, and gender and sexual identity issues. Following her Army career, she has been an advocate for LGBTQI rights and related matters and has been widely published on numerous media platforms such as Atlantic Magazine, the BBC, and CNN International. In 1991, Domi began work as a defense policy analyst on Capitol Hill for the late Congressman Frank McCloskey, who became the “conscience” of the U.S. House of Representatives during the Bosnian war. From her position as McCloskey’s defense policy analyst, she helped organize his first trip to Zagreb, Croatia after the start of the war in 1991. After pausing to take a sip of tea, she explains that her first trip to Bosnia in 1996 came, “as an outgrowth of [her] work on the Hill, which directly followed the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords”. It was also in 1996, while working on the Clinton Campaign, that she received a call from the State Department with a job offer and an urgent request for her to travel to Vienna. “I knew we were going to win [the campaign],” she says reassuringly. “So, I thought about it overnight […] and it was I either go now or risk missing the experience of my life. And that was that. I called the State Department back first thing the next morning to accept the mission”. She was seconded by the State Department to work for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) as a human rights officer and soon found herself in Bosnia just one month before the September 1996 elections were held. Her initial assignment was to be posted to Sokolac, a town in the heart of Bosnia’s Republika Srpska entity, for the elections. Although she had already worked in a number of countries including the Philippines, Haiti, Gambia, and Nepal, she shares with me that, “The move was really quite a shock and I was not fully prepared for what was to come. I couldn’t believe I had ended up in Sokolac, which was, at that time, a center of virulent hatred for Bosnian Muslims.