Alma and her family moved to the United States as refugees in 2000, from Germany, where her parents fled to during the war in their home country of Bosnia and Herzegovina. She is fluent in Bosnian and is re-learning (though she still has knowledge of) German. English is her third language, followed by Spanish throughout high school and into college. She has a deep love of culture and languages being born in Germany, being ethnically from Bosnia, and living in the United States for most of her life. She hopes to learn Modern Standard Arabic and French next!
Bajramović was a CITS Security Leadership Program Scholar during her undergraduate education. She has done two internships through the VSFS program: one working on mapping cultural heritage sites in Syria, Bosnia, and Kosovo with the Smithsonian Institution, and the other researching the transition of power and democracy in the DRC for the DRC Desk of the Bureau of African Affairs of the Department of State. She interned with TradeSecure LLC working on compliance control and monitoring an export controls database for the Europe and Americas team.
She spent the Summer of 2018 in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina interning for the Post-Conflict Research Center, where she had the opportunity to research the war and its effects as well as work with other NGOs in partnership with the Center including: the IOM, World Bank BiH, the Italian Embassy, etc. In cooperation with the IOM and P-CRC she assisted the “Koračamo Zajedno” movement, where she worked with local student activists to work to end prejudice and all forms of extremism. She also had the opportunity to express another love of art through this and designed the logo and created the name for the movement. She also received training in photojournalism and journalistic writing in the Bosnian language as well as worked on transcription and transliteration projects of interviews with war survivors.
This past summer, she had the opportunity to intern with the Conflict Resolution Program on the Syria Mapping Project at The Carter Center, where she continued developing her technical and analytic knowledge through new programs including ArcGIS and PowerBI, received training in OSINT and geolocation and used these to create maps, researched and cleared databases, received a budgeting training, and wrote internal policy briefs and news updates for the team.
Outside of her research and work, she enjoys all forms of the arts: particularly acting, singing, and dancing! She has been an extra in a few movies, sung with and opened for famous Bosnian singers, danced in a traditional Bosnian Folkloric dance group for 6 years, learned some belly dance, and is in UGA’s Ballroom Performance Group as a principal dancer, and serves as the group’s Vice President. Through BPG, she has choreographed several student pieces and assists in teaching the Foundations of Ballroom 1 class as well as helping the apprentice members of the company. She also enjoys photography, playing guitar, playing piano, and learning new languages!
Richard B. Russell Security Leadership Fellow
Genocide/Conflict, Conflict Resolution, Peace Mediation, Foreign Policy, Terrorism, WMD/Nuclear Security, Law, Human Rights, Cognitive/Behavioral Science Decision-Making
