Sarah Bressan
Head of Futures and Strategic Foresight
Sarah Bressan is Head of Futures and Strategic Foresight 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 futures analysis, the war in Sudan, and improving humanitarian aid in conflict settings. She recently led a multi-year, global analysis of extremism prevention trends and a strategic foresight process on geopolitical rivalry in EU enlargement candidate countries.
Sarah was a NATO Defense College Eisenhower Fellow for the 2024/2025 semester, researching how NATO thinks about the future, and the editor of PeaceLab and the 49security debate platform on Germany’s first national security strategy, and she testified in the German parliamentary commission on lessons from Afghanistan for future civil-military missions. She has contributed to evaluations of 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 and her analysis has been quoted in media outlets. She teaches future studies at Freie Universität Berlin and the European University Institute in Florence, and gives foresight trainings and workshops.
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.
