On 10 October 2019, the Swedish Academy announced that the Nobel Prize in Literature would go to Peter Handke. The decision sent shockwaves across much of the Balkans. The Austrian author is a Slobodan Milošević apologist and Bosnian genocide denier. Bosnian-American author Aleksandar Hemon called Handke the “Bob Dylan of Genocide Apologists.”

To many, the Swedish Academy conferring such an award to a genocide denier marked a new chapter in the mainstreaming of denial. American journalist Peter Maass who covered the war in the 1990s did an outstanding job of explaining the story behind the Swedish Academy’s scandalous decision.

Bosnian genocide denial has taken many forms from public statements to that effect by politicians to TikTok. But the denial started as early as the genocide did, in 1992. In fact, over the last three decades, there have been four identifiable stages of genocide denial.