Soha Saghir '21 has recieved a 2021 Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, "a one-year grant for purposeful, independent exploration outside the United States."

Soha's project is focused on violence, conflict, and peace within Muslim communities and will take her to New Zealand, India, Egypt, Ethiopia, Germany, France, and Canada, as she tells the Watson Foundation:

"How do Muslim communities grapple with internally and externally inflicted violence? In a post-9/11, conflict-ridden global landscape, Islam has been tied to violence in an inextricable fashion. I will approach Muslim diasporic communities around the world to explore and understand their perseverance in the form of peacebuilding practices."

The Center for Peace and Global Citizenship has been fortunate to know and work with Soha as both a student associate and a CPGC Fellow during her time at Haverford. She has also participated in several other CPGC-funded programs, including traveling to the 2019 World Summit of Nobel Laureates in Mérida, Yucatan where she and four other students co-lead workshops for the Youth Program.

"While all the opportunities that CPGC funding has afforded me have added to my project for the Watson in one way or the other, I think the opportunity to participate in and present at the Nobel Peace Summit was most pertinent. The summit brought together Nobel peace laureates and aspiring peacebuilders from around the world, and gave me the opportunity to workshop a mediational exercise titled 'The Other is Human Too: Building Bridges Across Intercultural and Interpersonal Differences'."

The experience of presenting a peacebuilding and conflict resolution workshop to a global audience, which she developed and facilitated with Tanisha Bansal ’21 and Noha El Toukhy ’22, gave Soha the confidence and skills to keep working in this realm for an extended period of time.

"It also showed me that in order to work with communities, you must engage ethically with a knowledge of socio-political and economic circumstances of all parties involved. Put together, all of these pieces have played a monumental role in making my Watson project what it looks like currently."