Sarah Bressan

Sarah Bressan is a research fellow at the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi) in Berlin, where she leads projects on strategic foresight, peace and security as well as monitoring and evaluation.

Sarah’s current projects cover the topics of forecasting and foresight in foreign and security policy, evaluating violent extremism prevention and future-proofing EU enlargement against security threats. She was a NATO Defense College Eisenhower Fellow for the 2024/​2025 semester, researching how NATO thinks about the future. Sarah was the editor of PeaceLab Blog and the 49security debate platform on Germany’s first national security strategy and testified in the German parliamentary commission on lessons from Afghanistan for future civil-military missions. Other experiences include evaluating small arms control in the Western Balkans and the World Food Program’s role in peacebuilding in Burkina Faso and the DR Congo. Sarah has published research on topics such as European foreign policy, grey zone warfare, and conflict early warning. In addition to her research work, she gives trainings and workshops on strategic foresight and regularly speaks and moderates at international conferences.

Prior to joining GPPi, Sarah analyzed conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa at Freie Universität Berlin and Mannheim University. She supported academia-policy exchange and training programs at FU Berlin, the German Federal Foreign Office and the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), worked on conflict sensitivity in development projects with the European Investment Bank and the Institut Européen de Coopération et de Développement in Beirut, and led intercultural exchange projects in Germany, Kenya and South Africa. She co-founded Better Think Tanking, an initiative to improve leadership and management practices in the non-profit sector, and has published research on how think tanks achieve and measure impact.

Sarah studied international security and political science at Mannheim University, the University of Seoul, FU Berlin, and Sciences Po Paris.