Tim Judah is a British reporter and political analyst for The Economist, and has written several books, mainly focusing on Serbia and Kosovo. He is considered an expert authority on the Balkans.
Tim Judah began his career at the African service of the BBC World Service. He has reported from many flashpoints around the world, including the states of the former Yugoslavia, El Salvador, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Niger, Darfur, Uganda, North Korea, Georgia, Armenia, Haiti and Ukraine. In 1997, based on his reporting of the Yugoslav Wars Judah criticized "academics imbued with a two dimensional view of the world" such as Francis Fukuyama for discussing the revolutions of 1989 as heralding the end of history. Judah has been described by The Guardian newspaper as "a distinguished foreign correspondent." As a writer his style combines reportage, interviews and history and his main focus, as a journalist, has been on conflict in Africa and Eastern Europe, in particular the Balkans. He has written three books on the Balkans region, most notably The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia published by Yale University Press in 1997 and Kosovo: War And Revenge with the same publisher in 2002. He was an eyewitness to many of the most notable battles of the Yugoslav Wars including the siege of Dubrovnik and the battle of Vukovar. Judah is considered an expert authority on Balkan politics. As a Senior Visiting Fellow at the European Institute of the London School of Economics in 2009 he developed the concept of the . He has described the Yugosphere as "a way of describing the renewal of thousands of broken bonds across the former state," a social and political phenomenon with a certain political application. In the Balkans itself, he is president of the board of the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network and a member of the board of the Kosovar Stability Initiative. Elsewhere in Eastern Europe, Judah has reported on the Euromaidan Revolution and the War in Donbass. His most recent book In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine was published in December 2015. Judah's work on Africa has included a BBC Radio 4 documentary on Mouridism. His work has also touched on African sporting achievements with his 2008 book Bikila: Ethiopia’s Barefoot Runner shortlisted for the best new sportswriter category in the 2009 British Sports Book Awards. Judah has also worked in 2013 as a regular columnist for Bloomberg. He has celebrated the Jewish festival of Passover in both Baghdad during the American invasion of 2003 and Donetsk during the Russian invasion of 2014.
Kosovo
Regarding the Kosovo-Serbia question, Judah writes in his The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia in the section Kosovo: Land of Revenge that the reincorporation of Kosovo to Serbia in 1944 was "the equivalent of reincorporating a cancer into the Serbian body politic".
