Sarah Brockmeier

Sarah Brockmeier is a non-resident fellow at the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi) and a doctoral researcher at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF). She is interested in how to better engage citizens in foreign policy debates and her doctoral research focuses on the impact of citizen dialogues on foreign and security policy on citizens’ trust in policymakers. 

Over almost a decade of work at GPPi, Sarah’s work focused on preventing and addressing violent conflicts and mass atrocities. She led GPPi’s PeaceLab project and was editor of the PeaceLab Blog, which features debates about Germany’s policies on crisis prevention, stabilization and peacebuilding. She produced and hosted the PeacebyPeacepodcast on the same topics.

Sarah’s projects covered mass atrocities, support to local conflict management by UN peace operationsand the politics of security sector reform. In the context of GPPi’s research project Global Norm Evolution and the Responsibility to Protect, she has published articles on Europe and the Responsibility to Protect, on the 2011 Libya intervention, and on debates held in key emerging powers about the protection of civilians. Sarah co-authored​“In the Shadow of Syria: Assessing the Obama Administration’s Efforts on Mass Atrocity Prevention” and published the first-ever detailed examinationof Germany’s role before, during, and after the Rwandan genocide. In 2019, she co-authored the book Krieg vor der Haustür: Die Gewalt in Europas Nachbarschaft und was wir dagegen tun könnenwith Philipp Rotmann(Dietz).

Sarah has been a guest on Al Jazeera and Deutsche Welle, and her commentary has appeared in Project Syndicate, War on the Rocks, DIE ZEIT, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Die WELT, and Frankfurter Rundschau, among others. Sarah has taught seminars on the responsibility to protect and UN peacekeeping at the German Academy for the Armed Forces and the German National Academic Foundation. 

Sarah holds a bachelor’s degree in international politics and history from Jacobs University Bremen and completed an exchange semester at Sciences Po Paris in 2008. After her undergraduate studies, Sarah worked for two years at the United Nations Development Operations Coordination Office in New York, supporting reforms on internal UN coordination. Before joining GPPi, Sarah completed an MPhil in international relations at the University of Cambridge. For her studies in Bremen and Cambridge, and as a fellow with the Carlo Schmid Program, Sarah received scholarships from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the German National Academic Foundation. 

From 2018 to 2021 Sarah was a member of the Heinrich Böll Foundation’s Europa/​Transatlantik (Europe and Transatlantic Relations) advisory council and she is currently a member of the Böll Foundations’s forum Neue Sicherheitspolitik.