Brankica Petković, mag.

Brankica Petković holds an MSc in Sociology of Culture and is a researcher at the Peace Institute. Her work focuses on media, democracy and human rights, with particular emphasis on media systems, media pluralism, journalism, communication rights and democratic communication. She combines research, public policy and civil-society engagement in efforts to strengthen media freedom, media accountability and an inclusive public sphere.

She led the Media Watch programme, a research, publishing and public platform for critical reflection on media policies, journalism and media practices in Slovenia, from 1998 to 2013. She has also led projects aimed at protecting the watchdog role of journalists and civil society, researching and responding to hate speech, and monitoring attacks against journalists and civil-society organisations. Her work in Slovenia has further included contributions to media policy development and reform, strengthening the independence and accountability of public service media, advancing media self-regulation, protecting freedom of expression, and promoting democratic participation and citizens’ communication rights.

For more than two decades, she has led and contributed to comparative research and advocacy initiatives across South East Europe, primarily within the regional network of media centres and research organisations SEENPM (South East European Network for Professionalisation of Media). She led a pioneering study on media ownership and its impact on media independence and pluralism across 18 post-socialist European countries and conceived and directed the South East European Media Observatory. Within regional research projects, she developed research methodologies and led regional research teams examining media-system reform, media integrity, media financing, professional journalism, trust in the media, propaganda, disinformation and hate narratives, media and information literacy, and the future of media and democracy.

At the European level, she has participated in comparative research on media pluralism, the independence of media regulators, the representation of women in the media, and the diversity and pluralism of online media. She contributed to the development of the methodology for monitoring media pluralism in the European Union and to the implementation of the Media Pluralism Monitor within the Centre for Media Pluralism and Media Freedom (CMPF) at the European University Institute in Florence. From 2023 to 2026, she coordinated the Slovenian team in the Horizon Europe project MeDeMAP – Mapping Media for Future Democracies, which explored the relationship between media and democracy in Europe through research on media policy, news production, media use and participatory forms of citizen engagement.

Before joining the Peace Institute, she worked as a journalist in Osijek, served in the office of Janez Drnovšek as Slovenia’s member of the Presidency of the former Yugoslavia, and worked at Open Society Institute – Slovenia, where she directed programmes on media, human rights and support for refugees from Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war.

SICRIS