Associate Professor Anne Bartlett
PhD University of Chicago
Associate Professor Anne Bartlett is an Africanist. She has worked on Sudan, South Sudan and East Africa for more than two decades. Her research centres on conflict and its effects on society. Notably, humanitarian crises, forced displacement (refugees and IDPs), land use, conflict urbanization and resource extraction. She is an ethnographer by training and has worked in fieldwork settings with a diverse group of people, ranging from armed movements to displaced persons and street children.
Her early work was with the armed movements of Darfur to understand how human rights abuses, underdevelopment and lack of political recognition on the part of the government, impacted the uprising in the region. Work in Nyala, Darfur, showed how war, the influx of IDPs and humanitarian aid impacted host communities in terms of livelihoods, the morphology of the city and the landscape ecology of the surrounding area.
Later research in conjunction with the UNHCR and World Bank aimed to understand the impact of refugees on the host community in Kakuma camp, Kenya. As the site of one of the longest protracted displacement situations in the world, Kakuma camp has generated significant interaction effects between the refugees and their hosts, the Turkana people. This work was published in a World Bank/UNHCR report entitled “Yes in My BackYard: The Economics of Refugees and Their Social Dynamics in Kakuma, Kenya.
In recent years, Professor Bartlett has led a joint UNSW/Gulu University project on conflict drivers within the northern Uganda region. This partnership showed that land conflict, deforestation and over production of charcoal was a major factor driving recent antagonisms in the region. Data from this project resulted in an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant that establishes a ‘Payment for Ecosystem Services’ project in Northern Uganda with the aim of creating cost effective and scalable ways through which behaviour around deforestation can be changed.
Professor Bartlett was the chair of the United Nations hearing on the Darfur crisis, UN commission on Human Rights, 60th Session, Geneva, Switzerland, April 2004.She was President of the Sudan Studies Association from 2015-2017 and is currently President of the African Studies Association of Australasia and the Pacific (AFSAAP). She is also Associate Editor of ARAS (The Australasian Review of African Studies).
- Publications
- Media
- Grants
- Awards
- Research Activities
- Engagement
- Teaching and Supervision
Arts Design and Architecture Grant (2021) $25,000.
ARC Discovery Grant DP190103742 (2018) $579,000. “Improving payments for ecosystem services efficacy: experiments in Uganda” (with Dr. Sarah Walker, Prof Jennifer Alix Garcia and Prof Volker Radeloff).
UNSW (2018) Business School Small Research Grant: $25,000 (with Sarah Walker and Paul Munro)
UNSW (2017) Institute for Global Development Grant (Conflict Resurgence and the Governance of Peace in Northern Uganda): $93,100
UNSW (2016) Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Small Grant. (Street Children in Kakuma: Towards an Understanding of the decision-making processes involved in child labor: $7,500
USF (2008) Jesuit Foundation Grant (Economic Geography of Darfur): 5,000
Research Collaboration Award (2018) UNSW, Sydney.
Faculty Service Award Recipient, University of San Francisco, June 2010
I have founded and have run various human rights NGOs in Sudan and in diaspora. I have written dozens of OpEds on the human rights situation in Sudan and has worked for the release of people that have been incarcerated without due process or regard to international human rights norms. I have also chaired sessions at the United Nations in Geneva on these matters.
From 2015 -2017, I was the President of the Sudan Studies Association. I am currently the President of the African Studies Association of Australasia and the Pacific (AFSSAP). I am also Associate Editor of ARAS -- the journal of the Association.
I was appointed as Lead for one of the four UNSW, Sydney engagement projects in northern Uganda as part of the UNSW, 2025 Strategy. My role role involved looking at the prevention of conflict - particularly in relation to land in post-conflict Acholiland, deforestation and illegal charcoal production
My Research Supervision
“The use of community radio to promote the adoption of Climate Smart farming technologies among smallholder farmers in Kenya. A case of Migori County”
My Teaching
“Key Debates In International Studies" INST 1005
“Contemporary Developments in Africa and the Middle East” INST1007
"Senior Seminar In International Studies" INST 3900
"International Fieldwork" HUMS 1007