Maja Sahadžić is Assistant Professor of Constitutional Law at the Faculty of Law and Researcher at the Montaigne Centre for Rule of Law and Administration of Justice (Utrecht University) (see her profile here), Visiting Professor (University of Antwerp), Senior Research Fellow (Law Institute in BiH), and Affiliated Scholar (Center for Comparative and Transnational Law at CUHK). She is also Co-chair of the Committee on New Directions in Scholarship of the ICON S, the largest international learned society with members from all around the globe.
Before joining Utrecht University, Maja was Assistant Professor and Postdoc (University of Antwerp) while she also held academic positions in Belgium, BiH, Croatia, and the United States. Her doctoral and post-doctoral research was funded by the FWO Flanders.
Her research revolves around multilevel governance, dynamic legitimacy, dynamic stability, asymmetries, the rule of law, constitutional values and principles, authoritarianism, antidemocratic risks caused by technology, constitutionalism under extreme circumstances, and alternative conflict solutions. Her passion is also the methodology of (legal) research. Her research is interdisciplinary and comparative and she often experiments with methodological frameworks that include a fusion of empirical and qualitative approaches.
She has been a visiting researcher at the University of Toronto, the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, The University of Hong Kong, MGIMO University in Moscow, and Victoria University of Wellington and a visitor on the study visit at the Center for Democracy Studies Aarau and the Swiss Parliament.
She is one of the supervisors in the University of Antwerp project team in a Horizon Europe-funded project Legitimult.
Maja remains an expert in the constitutional system of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Balkans' politics.
She has been a consultant or adviser including the diplomatic missions of the USA, Italy, Belgium, the Flemish Parliament, UN, UNDP, USAID, and SDC. She has also worked as a lawyer.
Maja is involved in many outreach activities. Some of the recent ones are available at ConstitutionNet, Verfassungsblog, Eurac, and AlJazeera Balkans.
Maja is also an honorable UNESCO Educational Network for International Cooperation and Peace member.
Since 2021, Maja also holds an honorary doctorate from FABC/LUI (Brazil).
Her book “Asymmetry, Multinationalism and Constitutional Law, Managing Legitimacy and Stability in Federalist States” (Routledge) was nominated for the 2020 Book of the Year in Constitutionalism and announced among the 2020 Books of the Year on Federalism by the International Forum on the Future of Constitutionalism. See the book presented here.
In 2018 she received the Ronald Watts Award for the best article on using the concept of constitutional asymmetries to contribute to the Middle East Peace process.