After graduating from high school, he graduated in history at the Department of History at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Sarajevo, in Sarajevo in 1987, and received his master's degree from the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb in 1991, where he also successfully defended doctoral thesis ten years later, in 2001.
From 2006 to 2009 he was the project-leader of the Bosnian research team with the international scientific project, the "New and Ambiguous Nation-building Processes in South-eastern Europe: Collective Identities in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Moldova and Montenegro in Comparison (1944–2005)" , which was realized at the Institute for Eastern European Studies, at the Department of History, FU Berlin, Germany.
[1] During 2013, he was the project-leader of the Bosnia and Herzegovina research team with the project entitled “Repräsentationen des sozialistischen Jugoslawien im Umbruch“, at the Humboldt-Universität, Berlin, Germany.
[1] During May 2012, he was a visiting professor at L'École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, in Paris.
He has published 9 books and close to 100 scientific papers on the history of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 19th and 20th centuries.