Saskia Brechenmacher

Saskia Brechenmacher is a senior fellow in Carnegie’s Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program, where her research focuses on gender, civil society, and democratic governance in the United States and globally.

She has advised major governmental and private funders on strategies to advance women’s political participation and defend civic space in countries experiencing democratic backsliding. Her writing has been published in Democratization, Foreign Policy, Just Security, National Interest, Open Democracy, World Politics Review, and elsewhere. She is the co-author (with Katherine Mann) of Aiding Empowerment: Democracy Promotion and Gender Equality in Politics, published with Oxford University Press in 2024.

Brechenmacher currently serves on the board of directors of the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law and as a member of the Advisory Group of the OECD’s Civic Space Observatory. Prior to joining Carnegie, she worked as a researcher at the World Peace Foundation in Boston and co-led a project on governance and corruption in Uganda for the Henry J. Leir Institute for Migration and Human Security at Tufts University. She is a 2017 Atlantik-Brücke Young Leader and a Humanity in Action Senior Fellow and previously gained experience at Carnegie Europe in Brussels, the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in London, and the EUROPEUM Institute for European Policy in Prague. She holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge, where she studied as a Gates Cambridge Scholar.