ELISABETH BRAW
Government and business adviser
International affairs commentator
Author of the upcoming book Goodbye, Globalization: The Return of a Divided World (2024)
Elisabeth unpacks the extraordinary challenges executives face as they rush to figure out how to reduce operations in risky countries and bring them to safer ones while keeping profits high.
Elisabeth Braw is a senior associate fellow at the European Leadership Network, where she focuses on defense against grayzone aggression and other new national security threats. She is also a columnist with Foreign Policy and Politico Europe, where she writes on national security and the globalized economy, and the author of The Defender’s Dilemma: Identifying and Deterring Grayzone Aggression. Elisabeth is a member of GALLOS Technologies’ advisory board, a member of the UK National Preparedness Commission, a Krach Institute for Tech Diplomacy advisory council member (on leave), an adviser to Willis Towers Watson’s research arm, and a member of the steering committee of the Aurora Forum (the UK-Nordic-Baltic leader conference).
Elisabeth’s book Goodbye, Globalization: The Return of a Divided World (Yale University Press, 2024). She regularly writes op-eds for the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Times, and (writing in German) the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and is also the author of God’s Spies, about the Stasi (2019). Elisabeth attended university in Germany, graduating with a Magister Artium in political science and German literature.
Speech topics
Geopolitics colliding with globalization
For the past three-and-a-half decades, globalization has been growing and growing, conquering all manner of crises along the way. But now globalization is stumbling, because it’s colliding with geopolitics. Companies that have spent years building up operations in Russia and China are hastily having to withdraw – but dismantling such large operations is extremely complicated, and it’s made far more complicated by the fact that both countries are now the West’s geopolitical adversaries. Executives face an extraordinary challenge as they rush to figure out how to reduce operations in risky countries and bring them to safer ones while keeping profits high. Hear about how they’re doing it – and what else they should do.
Books
Goodbye Globalization: The Return of a Divided World
A bold new account of the state of globalization today—and what its collapse might mean for the world economy
The Defender's Dilemma: Identifying and Deterring Gray-Zone Aggression
International security expert Elisabeth Brawer offers the first sustained analysis of how these tactics in the gray zone between war and peace dangerously weaken liberal democracies, which are open societies by definition and intimately connected to the rest of the world through globalization.
God's Spies: The Stasi’s Cold War Espionage Campaign inside the Church
The real-life cloak-and-dagger story of how East Germany’s notorious spy agency infiltrated churches here and abroad