The ANU Australian Studies Institute (AuSI) is excited to welcome Dr Susan Engel, our penultimate Visiting Fellow from the 2023–24 Visiting Fellowship Program. Susan joins us from the University of Wollongong and her Fellowship project, Australia and the Global South: Connecting for Development and Democracy, will focus on Australia’s relationship to, and engagement with, efforts to achieve development and democracy.

While at ANU, Susan will utilise the University’s libraries and the National Library of Australia to gather key materials and engage with various experts to deepen her understanding of key topics and provide historical context for her research. The University’s location in Canberra will offer a great opportunity for Susan to conduct interviews with current and former policymakers.

Susan’s Fellowship with AuSI will assist in developing her third monograph, which will explore Australia’s engagement with the Global South by examining both foreign policy and its practical manifestations through government programs. The monograph will include chapters on aid and development finance, areas which Susan has extensive academic and professional experience in, which will be a focus during her Fellowship.

Susan’s project will contribute to a recently neglected academic engagement with Australia’s foreign relations, bringing a much-needed contemporary perspective to national discourse on foreign policy and the Global South.

“The policies of the Global North profoundly shape and constrain prospects for development in the South, and right now human development is going backward in many parts of the Global South, which is linked to growing debt issues, the climate crisis and an increasing number of conflicts. If Australia wants to develop genuine partnerships with neighbours to promote a stable region - as we claim - we need to fully understand the impacts of our policy choices and programs and how they are received. Being at ANU, being able to chat with experts working on a range of related projects has dramatically progressed my thinking and helped me shape this project.”

- Dr Susan Engel, Visiting Fellow, ANU Australian Studies Institute

Dr Susan Engel is an Associate Professor of Politics and International Studies, and Co-Director of the Future of Rights Centre, University the Wollongong, Australia. She is coming to AuSI to work on her new project on Australia and the Global South: Connecting for Development and Democracy. Susan researches the impacts of neoliberalism on the theory and practices of development and development finance. She is a co-editor of the 2022 Routledge Handbook of Global Development and co-author of The Global Architecture of Multilateral Development Banks: A System of Debt or Development? (with AR Bazbauers, 2021, Routledge). She also has 2010 book on the Word Bank plus over 30 articles and book chapters.

Susan is a committed teacher of development studies, international politics, political economy and public policy and has written about pedagogy and curriculum. She worked in the government, community, and aid sectors before becoming an academic. She is on the research committee of the Jubilee Australia Research Centre and volunteers with indigo foundation, a not-for-profit community development.