Saskia Brechenmacher is a Fellow in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where her research focuses on trends in democracy, gender equality, and civic space around the world. She is also a PhD candidate and a Gates Cambridge Scholar at the University of Cambridge, researching violence against women in politics and resistance to women’s political participation in Kenya. Her writing has been published in Just Security, Foreign Policy, the National Interest, the Hill, and Open Democracy, among other outlets. She has advised major governmental and private funders on strategies to advance women’s political participation and strengthen civil society, including SIDA, the Ford Foundation, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the FCDO. She currently serves as a member of the Advisory Group of the OECD’s Civic Space Observatory.

Prior to joining Carnegie, Brechenmacher worked at the World Peace Foundation, the Henry J. Leir Institute at Tufts University, and the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in London. She is a 2017 Atlantik-Brücke Young Leader and a Humanity in Action Senior Fellow. Originally from Germany, she attended the United World College in Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina and holds an M.A. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and a B.A. in political science from Brown University.