PON Summer Fellows

2007
2006
2005

2007

Gu Yoon Chung
Project: Alternative Energy Assistance to North Korea as a Means to Facilitate Negotiation, Nautilus Institute, San Francisco and Boston, USA
Read the report

Gu Yoon Chung is a candidate for the Master in Public Administration at the Kennedy School of Government. A graduate of Seoul National University (BA, MPA), he joined the South Korean Foreign Service in 2000, where he served at the North America and Southeast Asia desks. At the Kennedy School, Gu Yoon has been studying the potential as well as the impact of technology in solving international disputes. This summer, he plans to work for the Nautilus Institute to devise policy options for rendering energy assistance to North Korea, which has been a key factor in securing North Korea’s commitment to abandon nuclear weapons facilities. Gu Yoon’s main responsibilities will include leading the project to synthesize existing literature produced by Nautilus on the topic, providing original analysis and prescription on South Korean negotiating options, and updating data on North Korea’s energy infrastructure and capacity. 

Amy Finnegan
Project: The Perception of Negotiation and Nonviolent Action in Northern Uganda
Read the report

Amy Finnegan is a PhD student in Sociology at Boston College. She received her MALD degree from the Fletcher School at Tufts University in May 2005, and graduated from Washington University in St. Louis in 2000. Amy is interested in issues related to war and peace, social movements, and human rights issues such as HIV/AIDS. She has worked in or on issues related to Uganda for the past seven years and has increasingly become committed to understanding conflict resolution dynamics in the north of the country, a region that has known over twenty years of violent war. In Uganda, Amy has worked with public health and education NGOs as well as with human rights activists. For the past two years, Amy has worked part-time at the Program on Negotiation (PON) on an initiative examining the intersection of negotiation and strategic nonviolent action. This summer, she hopes to explore further how both negotiation and nonviolent action methodologies are perceived and understood in Northern Uganda. She plans to build her study with an affiliate of Gulu University in Gulu, Uganda.

Scott Paltrowitz is a second year student at Harvard Law School. He graduated from Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations and has a Masters in Public Administration from the Cornell Institute of Public Affairs. Scott has experience working with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees at a refugee camp in Kakuma, Kenya; the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical at Greater Boston Legal Services; and Professor Daniel Shapiro’s International Negotiation Initiative at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. This summer, Scott will be undertaking an internship with the International Rescue Committee at a refugee camp along the Thailand-Burma border, assisting in the development of dispute resolution mechanisms within the camp.  The Legal Assistance Center of the International Rescue Committee in Thailand has established this dispute resolution project as a means to more effectively and fairly resolve conflicts within the camp, and to provide greater access to justice to those in the camp, such as survivors of domestic violence. 

Maria Placht
Internship: UNESCO’s World Water Assessment Program, From Potential Conflict to Cooperation Potential, Paris, France
Read the report

Maria Placht is a candidate for the Fletcher School’s Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy, focusing on conflict resolution and environmental policy. After graduating from Connecticut College in 2003, she worked at the Desert Development Center in Cairo, Egypt, and the Environmental Law Institute in Washington, DC. These experiences, along with her research in Yunnan, China, on the upstream deforestation of the Yangtze and Mekong Rivers, led to her current interest in transboundary water conflict resolution. At Fletcher, she participates in the Water: Systems, Science, and Society program, and is a research assistant at the Stockholm Environment Institute. This summer, Maria will work on a program that addresses the challenge of sharing international water resources by promoting cooperation between water management authorities. She will focus on the development of tools for the anticipation, prevention, and resolution of transboundary water conflicts.

Monica Wisner
Project: Repatriation of Refugees and Dispute Settlement in Afghanistan, Herat, Afghanistan
Read the report

Monica Wisner is a candidate for the Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy at the Fletcher School where she is studying human security and international negotiation and conflict resolution. She graduated from the University of Notre Dame and recently returned from working in Nepal for nearly four years. There she was the program coordinator of the country's oldest civic organization and devoted her time to youth development during a period of major political and social turmoil. This summer she will work with the Norwegian Refugee Council in Herat, Afghanistan to conduct research on communities receiving repatriated refugees, tensions that arise from in-migration, and dispute settlement mechanisms employed by locals to peacefully resolve conflicts.

2006

Anika Locke Binnendijk
Project: Negotiation, Loyalty Shifts, and Nonviolent Strategy in the
Serbian Otpor Movement to Oust Milosevic
Read the report

Anika Binnendijk is a PhD candidate at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. She received her MALD degree from Fletcher in May 2006, and she graduated cum laude from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School in 2003, with a certificate in Contemporary European Politics and Society. Anika has pursued her professional interests in international security and political development through internships at the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, and the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee.  This past summer, Anika conducted a research mission to Serbia to examine the tactics and strategies of Otpor, the student-led nonviolent movement that toppled Milosevic’s regime in 2000. In particular, she considered the relevance of negotiation and conflict resolution literature to Otpor’s efforts to persuade the Serbian police and military not to engage in repressive violence against the movement. 

Zev Eigen
Project: Litigants' Perceptions of Justice and Fairness in Mandatory Arbitration of Employment Disputes  
Read the report

Zev Eigen is a second year PhD student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Institute for Work and Employment Research (IWER). He graduated from Cornell University in 1996 and Cornell University Law School in 1999. Zev has experience teaching law and ADR at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego and Cornell University, and as a lawyer in California and Hawaii. He has also lectured and published extensively. Zev spent the past summer researching the debate surrounding the use of mandatory arbitration to resolve employee disputes. He interviewed individuals who have brought employment law claims, primarily to address issues of procedural fairness.

Susan is a joint-degree Master of Arts student at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and Harvard Divinity School.  She is a graduate of Tufts University and was a visiting scholar to Naropa University in Katmandu, Nepal.  Susan has experience working with the Carter Center, the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, the Paulist Center, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, and Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights.  This summer, she worked with the Academy for Educational Development as an intern/consultant at their Sri Lankan field office, assisting in the capacity-building of a local initiative called the Sri Lankan Inter-Religious Peace Foundation. The Foundation brings together religious leaders from throughout the country who support the peace process in order to combat the effect of those who have opposed negotiated settlements as a means to end civil conflict. 

Rachel Schiller
Project: Mediating Peace in Internal Conflicts: The Case of
Aceh, Indonesia
Read the report

Rachel Schiller is a candidate for the Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy at the Fletcher School. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with honors in 1999 and has studied at L'Ecole Superieur de Commerce in Lyon, France and Nanjing University in Nanjing, China. Rachel has recently returned from four years of humanitarian relief with the International Rescue Committee, International Relief and Development and UNDP, including a year of tsunami relief in Aceh. Prior to that, she worked for the US Commission on National Security/21st Century and the American Red Cross. Rachel spent the summer traveling to Aceh, Jakarta, Stockholm, Geneva, and Helsinki, researching the factors that led to the signing of the peace agreement between the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) and the Government of Indonesia (GOI) in 2005.

2005

Gillian Cull
Project: The Transformation of Non-State Armed Groups: An Analysis of Developing DDR Project in Sudan and Afghanistan
Read the report

Gillian Cull is a 2006 candidate for the Fletcher School Master of Arts in Law & Diplomacy, focusing on negotiation and conflict resolution. Originally from Scotland, she graduated from Oxford University in 1994 and then spent six years in the UK Diplomatic Service, working on Balkans policy during the Kosovo conflict and serving in Beijing in the Economic Section of the British Embassy to China from 2001-2004. Now in her first year at Fletcher, Gillian is studying negotiation and peace processes and works as a research assistant for the school's Centre for Human Rights and Conflict Resolution. She plans to spend the summer in Sudan researching the process of demilitarization in the aftermath of peace accords.

Keira Goldstein
Internship: Peace Through Health Initiative, Jerusalem
Read the report

As a junior at Stanford University, Keira Goldstein spent a semester in Jerusalem where she witnessed the first months of the current conflict.  That summer she volunteered in an orphanage in Guatemala, a country still recovering from its 36 year civil war. After graduation, Keira moved to Guatemala where she continued her work with the orphanage and taught. These experiences highlighted the need for conflict resolution work, which led Keira to Fletcher. Since coming to Fletcher, Keira has focused her attention, in and out of the classroom, on conflict resolution generally, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, in particular. She has obtained her certificate in mediation and worked as a facilitator of dialogues with high school students about diversity. Her internship is with a peace through health program, which brings together Arab, Israeli, and American doctors to work towards the dual goals of improved emergency medical training and establishing peace in the Middle East through improved Israeli-Palestinian relations. 

Marina Pevzner
Internship: Mercy Corps Conflict Management Group, Boston & Tbilisi
Read the report

Marina Pevzner is an Israeli Jewish woman whose family immigrated to Israel from Estonia when she was 9 years old. She was selected to attend Brandeis University as a Slifka Coexistence Scholar awarded to Jewish and Palestinian Israelis who are committed to coexistence. In Israel she worked as facilitator for the Reut-Sadaka, an organization which brings together Arab and Jewish youths, and also worked with Bat-Shalom, a women’s peace organization based in Jerusalem. At Brandeis she co-founded the Indian-Pakistani dialogue group and served as a co-coordinator and co-facilitator of the Arab-Jewish dialogue group on campus. In the summer of 2003 Marina worked with AHIMSA, a center for Conflict Resolution in Sri Lanka where she trained local staff and community leaders in dialogue and also co-authored a dialogue manual for facilitators in conflict regions. Currently, Marina is pursuing a MALD at Fletcher with a concentration in conflict resolution, negotiation and development field studies. This summer, Marina will work with Conflict Management Group (CMG) in Boston and with Mercy Corps’ (MC) regional office in Tbilisi, Georgia. Her responsibilities with CMG will include conflict assessment and program development work for Sri-Lanka. In Georgia, Marina will evaluate the Community Empowerment and Investment Program along the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceihan pipeline in Eastern Georgia and will help design a conflict mitigation program.