Sophia Besch

Sophia Besch is a senior fellow in the Europe Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her area of expertise is European defense policy.  Dr. Besch also teaches as an adjunct lecturer at Johns Hopkins SAIS.

Before joining Carnegie, Sophia was a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform (CER) in London and Berlin, where she led research on European armament policy, the EU’s role in European defense, transatlantic relations, German defense policy, and the security implications of Brexit.

Sophia has also worked with the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies and the Atlantic Council's Europe Centre, where she served as co-chair of the US-Germany Renewal Initiative.  Earlier in her career, Sophia was a Carlo Schmid fellow in NATO’s Policy Planning Unit and a researcher for the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. She is a member of the Atlantik Brücke Young Leaders program. 

Sophia regularly comments on political and defense issues in print and broadcast media and has published opinion pieces in the Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Internationale Politik, Politico, Project Syndicate, War on the Rocks, and others. She has served as an expert witness for the UK House of Commons Defence Select Committee, the German Bundestag EU Committee, and the European Parliament Subcommittee for Security and Defence.  

She holds a doctorate in European Studies from King’s College London, and degrees in international relations and international security from Sciences Po Paris and the London School of Economics.