Elisabeth Braw

Helena Elisabeth Braw (born December 2, 1973) is a Swedish security expert and former journalist active in Great Britain. She leads the Modern Deterrence project^[1] at the defense and security think tank RUSI^[2] in London. She is a senior fellow of the Transatlantic Security Initiative in the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council.^[3]

Braw was born December 2, 1973 in Tingsås parish in Kronoberg county.^[4] She is the daughter of the priest and writer Christian Braw and music director Karin Braw, nee Imberg,^[4] sister of Daniel Braw and granddaughter of Lars Braw and niece of Monica Braw.

She studied in Germany and her thesis was about the reduction of nuclear weapons in Europe. She worked in the late 1990s in Washington, D.C., then for a time in Italy, then again in Washington and then in San Francisco. She has been a visiting fellow at the University of Oxford. As a journalist, she has taken an interest in security policy issues; she still contributes debate articles to a wide range of newspapers and magazines. Among these can be mentioned the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs,^[5] Foreign Policy,^[6] The Times,^[7] The Economist and Svenska Dagbladet.^[8]

Among her reports are many with interviews of top politicians as well as articles with a historical focus.^[9]

Books

• Goodbye, Globalization: The Return of a Divided World (2024)^[10]
• The Defender’s Dilemma: Identifying and Deterring Gray-Zone Aggression (2022)
• God's Spies: The Stasi’s Cold War Espionage Campaign inside the Church (2019)