ABOUT THE MILLENNIUM FELLOWSHIP - CLASS OF 2024
United Nations Academic Impact and MCN are proud to partner on the Millennium Fellowship. This year, 52,000+ young leaders applied to join the Class of 2024 on 6,000+ campuses across 170 nations. 280+ campuses worldwide (just 5%) were selected to host the 4,000+ Millennium Fellows.
UNITED NATIONS ACADEMIC IMPACT AND MCN PROUDLY PRESENT LENA NAIM IBISHI, A MILLENNIUM FELLOW FOR THE CLASS OF 2024.
Central European University | Vienna, Austria | Advancing SDG 17 & UNAI 8
" I enjoy the study of power—how it fractures states, reshapes memory, and scripts the future. The Millennium Fellowship is a platform to turn analysis into genuine impact, and this is precisely why I am excited to be a part of this cohort. "
Millennium Fellowship Project: From Wars to Weddings: A Sociohistorical Study of Turbofolk
"Wars to Weddings" examines turbofolk as the sonic logic of post-Yugoslav collapse—born from the ruins of socialist aesthetics, reborn in the spectacle of NATO bombings, ethnic cleansing, and hypercapitalist kitsch. A third-order simulacrum in Baudrillard’s terms, turbofolk aestheticizes displacement, massacre, and debt, thus, rendering collective trauma into consumable spectacle. Through interviews with artists active before and after the wars, the film series traces how sound became the carrier of Agamben’s bare life, fusing Schopenhauerian melancholy with Nietzschean excess. From state ballads to nightclub anthems, turbofolk is where memory becomes choreography and history sings in questionably-done autotune.
About the Millennium Fellow
Lena Ibishi is a Kosovar-Albanian political strategist, security studies scholar, and emerging historian completing her degree in Political Sciences and International Relations at the Central European University in Vienna. Originally from the lakeside village of Orllan, she is the President of Protocol 71, a feminist, multiethnic NGO confronting environmental degradation and postwar exclusion in the Balkans. Fluent in five languages, Lena was awarded a full scholarship to the Vienna Diplomatic Academy, where she will continue to sharpen her focus on diplomacy and global security. She has served as a diplomatic apprentice at the Embassy of Kosovo in Austria and was personally mentored by Atifete Jahjaga—Kosovo’s first female president. As a CIVICA Ambassador, she co-authored inter-university policy proposals across five European capitals and has curated landmark events on transitional justice. Also a published poet, her debut collection "Europe’s Gunpowder" is held in Kosovo’s national libraries; a second body of work is currently in progress. Lena intends to become Kosovo’s youngest ambassador.
