Sarah S. Stroup
Non-Resident Fellow- Humanitarian relief and global development
- Conflict transformation and peacebuilding
- International NGOs and global private actors
- Western foreign aid programs
Sarah S. Stroup is the Frederick C. Dirks Professor of Political Science at Middlebury College (Vermont, USA), where she also directs the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Research. During her 2025-26 sabbatical year, she served as academic-in-residence at CMI-Martti Ahtisaari Foundation and was a Visiting Senior Fellow at FIIA.
Stroup is a graduate of Dartmouth College and the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on international non-governmental organizations (INGOs), humanitarian relief, democracy promotion, and human rights. She is author of Borders Among Activists (Cornell, 2012) and co-author with Wendy Wong of The Authority Trap (Cornell, 2017), which won the 2019 Outstanding Book award in Nonprofit and Voluntary Action Research from ARNOVA. She was co-investigator on “The Rise and Demise of NGOs,” a five-year project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada), and has conducted hundreds of interviews with NGO staff and partners around the globe.
Stroup is trained in reflective structured dialogue, basic mediation, and basic restorative practices. She is former executive director of the Davis Collaborative in Conflict Transformation (2022-25) and former co-director of the Engaged Listening Project (2018-2021), a Mellon Foundation-supportive initiative in structured dialogue.
Degrees
PhD (political science), University of California, Berkeley 2008
Language skills
English, French (reading), Chinese (basic)