Sylvie Kauffmann is a journalist and editorial director at Le Monde newspaper, where she writes a weekly geopolitics column. She was managing editor of the daily newspaper, the first woman to hold this post, in 2010-2011.

She began her career at the Agence France-Presse, then in the London, Noumea, Warsaw and Moscow offices, where she then joined the editorial staff of Le Monde at the end of 1987. From 1988 to 1993, she was responsible for covering Central and Eastern Europe. She covered the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the transition of the new European democracies to a market economy.

From 1993 to 2001, she was a correspondent in the United States, first in Washington and then in New York. She then returned to the central editorial office in Paris as a senior reporter, then as head of the investigation-reporting department. 

From 2004 to 2006 she was deputy editor-in-chief, before moving abroad as a senior reporter in Asia, based in Singapore until 2009. 

Sylvie Kauffmann is a graduate of the Faculty of Law and the Institute of Political Studies in Aix-en-Provence, from the University of Deusto in Bilbao (Spain) and from the Training Centre for Journalists in Paris.