About Smajo Bešo

When Smajo was seven years old the war came to his village in Bosnia. In the months and years that followed, his family were expelled from their home, his father held in a concentration camp, and his beloved aunt Emina killed in the siege of Mostar. His family came to the UK as refugees in 1994. He arrived in Newcastle at nine years old without a word of English, carrying everything the war had left him with.

Three moments from those years are at the heart of everything he now teaches. His own loss of faith in humanity at eight years old. His mother’s choice, on the worst day of her life, to tell her children not to become like those destroying them. And a teacher called Mrs Webster, who taught thirty children a song in Bosnian just so one child would feel seen.

But the story doesn’t end in Bosnia. What his family chose in that moment became the foundation of everything that followed.

Smajo arrived in Newcastle with nothing and rebuilt his life through education. He studied architecture at Newcastle University, then spent several years in professional practice specialising in the design of schools, colleges, and universities, the spaces where human potential is either cultivated or crushed.

He returned to Newcastle University as a lecturer, then as a researcher, exploring the relationship between the built environment, education, and human identity. Most recently his research has moved into human geography, the study of how human beings find belonging and meaning, and what happens when those things are taken away.

He is currently completing a PhD at Newcastle University on the Bosnian diaspora in the North East of England, drawing on oral histories with Bosnian refugees, their descendants, and the people who helped resettle them.

In 2020 he founded the Bosnian Genocide Educational Trust, serving first as Chair and then as CEO, building it into a nationally recognised organisation delivering survivor-led education across the UK. He established We Are school programme, the UK’s first survivor-led genocide education and storytelling programme for schools. He serves on the National Advisory Board of Remembering Srebrenica and works in an advisory capacity with a number of charities and organisations across the UK, including City of Sanctuary.

Alongside this, he has spent more than a decade speaking for government, the NHS, police forces, trade unions, and universities across the UK, as well as in Parliament, the Cabinet Office, and the House of Lords. He has been featured in national and international media including the Daily Mirror and Metro.

In 2023 he was honoured with an OBE by King Charles for his services to genocide and Holocaust education.

“In that moment, watching him stand with King Charles, all I could see was nine-year-old Smajo. That frightened little boy, hurting, missing his father, his grandparents, his auntie. And I thought how different his life could have been, yet thirty years later, his peacemaking has brought him all the way here. From war, to this."

Smajo's mother, Buckingham Palace, 2024

Attendee, Empowering Young People Conference, 2025

“As an English teacher, I love stories, but I had never heard story as a tool described in terms of changing thinking, feeling, and the potential to provoke action... that's powerful reframing, and Smajo epitomised it.”

That is the story behind the talks. The siege, the choice, the song in Bosnian. Two decades of trying to understand what those moments meant and a career built around teaching what they taught.

If you want to know what Smajo speaks about, and how he works with the organisations who book him, the Speaking page is the place to start.

© 2026 Smajo Beso OBE