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. She is currently an Eisenhower Defense Fellow at the NATO Defense College’s Research Division in Rome.

Sarah’s recent projects covered the topics of forecasting and foresight methods, violent extremism prevention and future-proofing EU security and enlargement. She also evaluated small arms control in the Western Balkans and the World Food Program’s role in peacebuilding. In addition, she was the editor of PeaceLab Blog and the 49security debate platform on Germany’s first national security strategy and has testified in the German parliamentary commission on lessons from Afghanistan for future out-of-area missions. Sarah has also published on topics such as European foreign policy, the future of NATO, disinformation, and conflict early warning.

Prior to joining GPPi, Sarah analyzed data on conflict dynamics in sub-Saharan Africa at Freie Universität (FU) 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 also co-founded Better Think Tanking, an initiative that works with organizations 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.