Aiding Empowerment

Saskia Brechenmacher is a Fellow in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a PhD candidate and Gates Cambridge Scholar at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on gender, civil society, and democratic governance, with a particular focus on women's political participation in new democracies. She has advised major governmental and private funders on strategies to promote women's political empowerment and support civil society activism and currently serves on the board of the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law. She is a 2017 Atlantic-Brücke Young Leader and previously worked for the World Peace Foundation, Carnegie Europe, and the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in London. Her writing has been published in Foreign Policy, Just Security, World Politics Review, The National Interest, The Hill, Open Democracy, and other outlets. Katherine Mann is a PhD candidate and Cambridge Trust Scholar at the University of Cambridge. Her research examines the role of gender in conflict, armed group behavior, and conflict-related sexual and reproductive violence. Previously, she was a Research Analyst in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She has also held positions as a Junior Fellow at the Conference of Defence Associations Institute, a Managing Editor at the Cambridge Review of International Affairs, and a Visiting Researcher at the Universidad de los Andes. Alongside her research, she has worked with non-governmental organizations to prevent political violence and support civic activism. She received her MPhil from the University of Oxford and her B.A. from the University of Georgia. Her writing has been published in Foreign Policy, Just Security, and other outlets.