Emília Sičáková Beblavá
Professor
Comenius University, Faculty of Social and Economic Siences, Public Policy Institute
About
Emília Sičáková Beblavá is a former president of Transparency International Slovakia, professor of public policy at the Faculty of Social and Economic Sciences of Comenius University in Bratislava, where she is with the Institute of Public Policy and Economics, and an author of fiction rooted in her native eastern Slovakia.
Born in 1975 in Snina, she co-founded Transparency International Slovakia in 1998 and served as its president until 2009, including on the organization's worldwide Executive Board from 2001 to 2004. She completed her PhD at the University of Economics in Bratislava in 2004, and in 2003 was a World Fellow at Yale University. Her research focuses on anti-corruption strategies, governance, decentralization, and public sector reform. She has collaborated with the World Bank, the European Commission, and the Open Society Institute on governance and anti-corruption policy in post-communist countries.
Alongside her academic work, she writes prose drawn from the Zemplín region where she grew up. In 2022 she published Korene (Roots), a collection of short stories from the region. In 2025 she published Smetisko, a novella based on a real case of civic resistance to a landfill project in eastern Slovakia during the communist era — a story that speaks directly to the themes explored in this volume. She brings to this book both scholarly expertise and a long personal connection to the questions it asks about the east of the country.