Rotary Peace Fellow employs AI for a better world

By Amy Hoak

During her Rotary Peace Fellowship, Branka Panic worked as a short-term consultant at the World Bank, joining a team that was building a model to predict the probability of famine.

The benefits of such a tool were obvious: “If a certain area will be in need of food in six months, in 12 months, we can prepare humanitarian aid more efficiently,” Panic says.

But unintended consequences of making that information available also became clear. “Our intention was to make humanitarian agencies ready,” Panic says. “But what if, by providing this signal as an open source, we were actually informing the government or any warring party out there to intentionally attack this population because they see there is a vulnerability?”

The exercise illustrated both the power and the danger of using such technologies. It surfaced ethical questions to be mindful of and the sensitivities of parsing data and sharing it widely.

It also motivated Panic, 42, to found AI for Peace, a think tank dedicated to issues like these, as well as how artificial intelligence has the potential to benefit peace, security, and sustainable development. She co-authored a book of the same name.

The organization’s focus areas include humanitarian action (using AI to save lives by anticipating and targeting response efforts); human rights and democracy (using AI to identify human rights abuses and protect defenders of human rights); and human security (using AI to protect people, as well as researching potential security threats). Positive use of AI technology can strengthen societies and prevent conflict in the first place, Panic says.

AI is already being used in peace negotiations. Israeli and Palestinian peacebuilders have used AI to facilitate large-scale dialogues aimed at ending the conflict in Gaza, she says. In some conflict areas, AI is breaking down language and dialect barriers. “We are using AI to say, ‘Wait a minute, we actually have quite an easy way to let people’s voices be heard in this peace process.’”

AI for Peace works with peacebuilders to build their knowledge and familiarity with artificial intelligence to become an active voice in designing, developing, and implementing new applications, she says. “We also work with data scientists, who quite often never thought about peacebuilding before, and we want them to become a little bit of peacebuilders themselves,” she adds.

In fact, Panic says everyone has agency to shape the future of AI and how it’s used — not only the experts and data scientists. While it can feel intimidating to participate for those who aren’t technology-minded, it’s important that individuals with varying perspectives have a say, Panic adds. “Everybody needs to be part of this conversation,” she says. “Rotarians as well.”

Born in Belgrade, Serbia, Panic lived through conflicts in the Balkans, an experience that shaped her worldview and motivated her to become a peacebuilder. She recalls the NATO bombing of her country, when school stopped and people had to live in basements and shelters. “These things tend to leave a mark,” she says. For her, it set her on a mission: to do all she could to prevent people from having to live through similar conflicts. 

Panic became an activist while in high school, joining the Otpor (“Resistance”) movement against the authoritarian regime of Slobodan Milošević, former president of Serbia and Yugoslavia. The group organized daily peaceful walks in resistance of Milošević, who eventually resigned and was charged with war crimes committed during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.

Protesting in 1999 and 2000, however, was done without much technology, she points out. In contrast, subsequent grassroots movements, such as the Arab Spring in the early 2010s, were able to benefit from social media tools to coordinate. “At the very beginning of my interest in technology, we started seeing how social media has been used to actually strengthen that type of activism,” she adds. “This was super empowering.”

With her Rotary Peace Fellowship, she was able to delve deeper into technology and AI to enrich her peacebuilding background. Rotary District 2483 in Serbia and Montenegro supported her fellowship, and the connection changed her life, she says.

Panic is now a Rotarian herself and is a charter member of the Rotary Club of Global Partners in Peace, an e-club for peace fellows and peace activists. The club hosts speakers who talk about their peacebuilding, humanitarian, and development work, and members live all around the world, from Mexico (where she lives, in San Miguel de Allende) to Chile, Nepal, and the Philippines. 

With her husband, Panic opened a “peace house,” which she describes as “a place where artists, thinkers, neighbors, diplomats, technologists, travelers, and unexpected guests can meet around one table.” Gatherings spark conversations among people of different backgrounds, an effort to turn “everyday encounters into small acts of peace,” she says.

The house is part of Panic’s ethos of stopping conflicts before they start. AI for Peace intentionally focuses on prevention of conflict and building resilience; it doesn’t focus on the ethics of AI in weapons of war but rather how to address root causes of human suffering and vulnerability.

“This is the niche that we decided to cover,” Panic says. “There are a lot of things to do in building peace or sustaining peace or making sure that wars don’t happen at all.”

This story originally appeared in the March 2026 issue of Rotary magazine.