is a Romani policy researcher holding a BA in Economics and an MA in Public Policy from the University of California Berkeley. He is the Research Officer of the Roma Education Fund. His sholarship focuses on inclusive education, intergroup conflict, collective trauma, and critical race theory. Pecak has authored educational chapters in the Roma Civil Monitoring Synthesis reports (European Union, 2020 & 2018), ‘Path to Higher Education: Combating Antigypsyism by Building Roma Students’, ‘Aspirations and Resilience: Dimensions of Antigypsyism in Europe’ (ENAR, 2019), and contributed to the joint research and report on ‘The Representation of Roma in European Curricula and Textbooks’ (Council of Europe, 2020).
Violence against Roma is part of the European normality. It took over seven decades for Europe to acknowledge the genocide of Roma in WWII, and the communities still don’t have the means to heal among permanent attacks and persecution, with racist sentiment on the rise.