Elizabeth Anderson was selected for the New Security Leaders program of the 2025 Warsaw Security Forum. Currently, she serves as a Research Director for the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (Canada), leading research on digital autocracy and democratic resilience. From September 2024 to May 2025, she resided in Washington D.C., serving as a Fulbright Scholar (2024–25) at the Center for a New American Security, where she was a visiting associate fellow with the Transatlantic Security Program.
Previously, she served as Director of Operations and Senior Advisor for International Security to Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. She was one of the leads on Canada’s policy response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, coordinating with allied governments during critical periods of the war, including in the lead up to the full-scale invasion. Elizabeth oversaw military export controls valued at C$3.5 billion annually. She directed operations for high-stakes consular cases and managed strategic planning for ministerial engagements across both bilateral and multilateral forums, including the G7 and NATO.
Her research examines how authoritarian regimes—particularly Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea—employ grey-zone warfare, with a particular emphasis on the cognitive domain, to subvert democratic cohesion and political will. She analyzes the strategic partnership dynamics among revisionist powers and develops frameworks for democratic resilience rooted in whole-of-society security models. She is particularly interested in how democracies can work with like-minded partners to protect liberal values and advance shared freedom and prosperity. Her work spans Canadian foreign and defence policy, transatlantic security, grey-zone warfare, autocratic alignment, and defence industrial strategy.
She holds a Master of Arts in Global Risk from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies and a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Political Studies from Queen’s University.
