Ten years without Håkan

Biljana Vankovska

July 3, 2020

It’s hard to believe it’s been a whole decade since my mentor and dearest viking, Håkan Wiberg, passed away! From our first meeting in 1997 at Copenhagen Peace Research Institute – COPRI (sadly, gone too), where he had been a longtime director, to the last days of his life he was my intellectual inspiration, academic guru, personal pillar, and a lucid mind that looked beneath the surface.

I could rely on him any time, facing any dilemma. We have published several joint papers, and most importantly a major book on civil-military relations in the post-communist Balkans, which I consider to be my true PhD thesis. The work with him was primarily a learning process: he taught me how to reconsider literally everything I had thought I knew (like a PhD from Skopje University), but we also argued a lot and had productive brainstorming sessions.

Yet he always treated me as an equal.