Cecily Brewer is a senior expert focusing on mediation with USIP’s peace processes team.

She previously served as Vice President Kamala Harris’s foreign policy advisor on Africa. She spent 15 years at the U.S. Department of State focused on international conflict and negotiation, strategic planning, and Africa policy. Her roles included serving as a member of the U.S. secretary of state’s policy planning staff, as an advisor to the U.S. special envoy for the Sahel region, as the team lead for the Nigeria desk, and as a speechwriter. Brewer also supported negotiations between Sudan and South Sudan and shaped U.S. policy on more than a dozen conflicts, including months-long assignments at several U.S. embassies in the Middle East, South Asia, Africa and Southeast Asia.

Before joining the State Department, Cecily worked for a conflict management NGO in Juba, South Sudan; at a foreign policy think tank in Berlin, Germany; and at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She has also published in the peer-reviewed International Negotiation journal on mediating ends to proxy wars.

She earned her master’s from the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and holds a bachelor’s from Amherst College. She was a post-graduate fellow at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany, and studied and lived abroad in France.