Prof Anna Macdonald

Anna’s research focuses on political violence; transitional justice; law and social order; displacement and migration; and the politics of humanitarian and state-building interventions, with a regional focus on east and central Africa. She is particularly interested in the relationship between authoritarianism, law, and justice at multiple levels, from the global, to the local.

Prior to embarking on a PhD, Anna spent time working as a researcher and policy adviser on foreign and defence policy and international development policy, firstly in London at the Institute for Public Policy Research and subsequently in Brussels, as a researcher at the NATO Parliamentary Assembly and later at the International Development Committee in the European Parliament.

Anna is a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa based at the London School of Economics (LSE) and a Senior Research Associate in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Johannesburg. Her research has been funded by the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust, the AHRC, the ESRC, the UK Department for International Development and the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. Anna is currently co-Investigator on the ESRC-funded Centre for Public Authority and International Development (CPAID), which conducts interdisciplinary research to strengthen knowledge about how governance functions in impoverished and marginalised places across the world.

She is co-editor of Humanitarianism: A Dictionary of Concepts (Routledge 2018) and her research has most recently been published in Africa, Development and Change, the International Journal of Transitional Justice, the Journal of Refugee Studies, African Affairs and Law and Society Review.

Anna is currently a co-director of research in the School of Global Development (DEV).