Conflict Transformation Fellowship Gives Students the Chance to Apply Their Skills to Real-World Projects

Middlebury Institute’s Conflict Transformation Fellowship pushes students to go beyond research papers to create practical tools that address conflict from a fresh perspective.

In early May, this year’s 40 fellows presented their projects at a daylong seminar titled Transforming Conflict: A Day of Dialogue. The fellows included students from all of the Institute’s graduate programs, from environmental policy and international development, to nonproliferation and terrorism and translation, interpretation, and localization.

Projects explored issues across disciplines, from ocean advocacy to Bitcoin fraud. Students developed websites and classroom lesson plans and performed on-the-ground fieldwork with partner nonprofit organizations for their final projects.

Spanish translation student Chelsea Flores used a comic strip and an illustrated glossary to help examine the six-day Football War between El Salvador and Honduras in 1969—a brief conflict that had a long-lasting impact on Flores’s personal history.

“This project was an outlet to help me establish a positive relationship with my history and bilingual abilities,” said Flores, who studied child psychology in college before joining the Institute’s rigorous translation program. “It gave me a confidence boost that I know what I’m doing by combining my interests.”

The fellowship is part of the Kathryn Wasserman Davis Collaborative in Conflict Transformation, a multiyear initiative focused on productively harnessing conflict for meaningful change.

“This fellowship helps clarify for students where they have influence—from their personal networks to professional spheres and broader communities,” said Dr. Netta Avineri, who established the graduate fellowship program at the Institute and was recently named executive director of the Middlebury-wide Conflict Transformation Collaborative. “Engaging with these essential topics is empowering for students, individually and collectively. During the year, students build not only their theoretical knowledge about conflict transformation but also their skills, through lectures, dialogues, and workshops. Then they apply that knowledge through an engaged project.”

Conflict Is a Common Thread

“The expansiveness of the conflict concept touches every program at the Institute and every person,” said Evans Nyamadzawo, a conflict transformation pedagogy fellow supporting the work of the collaborative.

“We’re all talking about conflicts, every day,” said Nyamadzawo, who is also a nonproliferation and terrorism studies student. “The collaborative is focused on the transformative power of conflict. Not the negative lens, but how conflict can make change.”

International policy student Ola Pozor completed the fellowship last year and is now a mentor fellow working with current cohort fellows. She said that the combination of developing a career deliverable, while also having the opportunity for critical self-reflection, is “where the magic of Middlebury Institute happens.”

“My fellowship project got me an internship with the International Organization for Migration,” Pozor said. “I’m encouraging students to keep their conflict transformation projects alive and send them along with their résumés.”

Diverse Programs and Projects

Ruiqi Ma’s conflict transformation project, where she helped an organization in Uganda build its operational capacity, came to be through Carolyn Meyer, director of experiential learning. While Ma is a translation and localization management student, this internship helped her build a variety of skills.

“This opportunity was not in my professional field,” Ma said. “But as a localization manager, you must reach different cultures. This was a similar idea, but a different field.”

The Conflict Transformation Fellowship is open to all Middlebury Institute students whether they attend in-person or online programs, and it opens for applications each spring.

“This fellowship improved my thinking on how to approach issues and expanded my viewpoints to look at systems,” said Neshae Johnson, MAIPD ‘26. “This helped me think of ways to approach conflict and complex development issues.”

“Grab this opportunity with both hands. It is a life-transforming process,” said Nyamadzawo.