Sarah S. Stroup
Sarah S. Stroup is a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs and a political science professor at Middlebury College (Vermont, USA). From 2022-2025, she was executive director of the Kathryn Wasserman Davis Collaborative in Conflict Transformation.
Stroup holds a PhD from 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 the 2019 Outstanding Book award in Nonprofit and Voluntary Action Research by 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. Her recent publications include an article with Sarah Bush in International Theory on human rights and democracy promotion and a book chapter on inequality in the humanitarian sector.
Stroup is trained in reflective structured dialogue, basic mediation, and basic restorative practices. She is former co-director of the Engaged Listening Project (2018-2021), a dialogic practice initiative for higher education supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.