Anderson is a Senior Conflict Advisor at USAID. She was previously an Institute of International Education Democracy fellow in the Office of Conflict Management and Mitigation at USAID. She is an adviser on conflict, fragility, and peacebuilding issues in the office and will be working on developing practitioner tools and frameworks as well as conducting her own research. She was previously a lecturer at Georgetown University and George Washington University.
She received a PhD in political science from George Washington University in 2017 where she wrote her dissertation on international aid in Somaliland. She was a 2016 Rosenthal fellow with the State Department’s Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor bureau. She conducted research and designed, implemented, and assessed aid programs in Sub-Saharan Africa for over a decade. Prior to beginning her PhD, she was a consultant for several aid organizations. She consulted with the South African Human Rights Commission to develop a conflict assessment tool, and with IOM and Oxfam/African Centre for Migration and Society to assess aid intervention. She also founded a startup that supports post-conflict peacebuilding efforts.
She received a David L. Boren fellowship to conduct her dissertation research in Ethiopia and Somaliland during the 2014-2015 academic year. She has produced journal articles, book chapters, and reports on conflict and post-conflict aid behavior, and presented this work to a range of academic and policy audiences. Her writing has appeared in outlets including Peace Research, CFR’s Africa in Transition, and Foreign Policy.