Alex de Waal

Alexander William Lowndes de Waal (born 22 February 1963), is the executive director of the World Peace Foundation at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.^[1] He is an authority on famine and has worked on the Horn of Africa since the 1980s as a researcher and practitioner. He was listed among Foreign Policy’s 100 most influential international intellectuals in 2008 and Atlantic’s 29 ‘brave thinkers’ in 2009 and is the winner of the Huxley Award of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 2024.^[2][3][4]

Previously, he was a fellow of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative at Harvard University, as well as program director at the Social Science Research Council on AIDS in New York City.^[5]

De Waal was born in Cambridge, United Kingdom to Victor de Waal, an Anglican priest, and Esther Aline Lowndes-Moir, an author. He attended The King's School, Canterbury.^[6] He graduated with a BA in Psychology with Philosophy from Corpus Christi College, Oxford in 1984 going on to receive a DPhil in social anthropology from Nuffield College, Oxford in 1988.^[6][7]

De Waal has worked on famine since began fieldwork for his DPhil in social anthropology on how rural people in Sudan understood famine and adopted coping strategies to try to survive it. A revised version of his dissertation was published as Famine that Kills: Darfur, Sudan, 1984-1985.^[8] This was influential in developing the concept of famine as a threat to a way of life, and contributed to the study of livelihood coping strategies and survival strategies. It also framed famine mortality as the outcome of health crises as well as starvation per se.

In the 1990s, de Waal focused on the intersection between human rights violations and famine, including censorship and the use of starvation as a weapon of war.^[9][10]

He was sharply critical of the role of humanitarian organizations in downplaying the politics and criminality of famine, arguing that an anti-famine political contract was the route towards famine prevention. This was the core theme of his 1997 book, Famine Crimes: Politics and the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa. ^[11] This book influenced a generation of researchers, students and aid practitioners to think critically about role of humanitarians in obscuring the underlying reasons for famine.

In the 2010s, de Waal returned to the topic of famine, posing the question, why the number and virulence of famines had declined, and what action was necessary to abolish them for good.^[12] His paper ‘The End of Famine’ in Political Geography, was the winner of the Elsevier Atlas Prize for 2017. ^[13][14]

By the time of the publication of his book Mass Starvation: The history and future of famine, later in 2017 de Waal was more pessimistic, noting that famines were making a comeback.^[15] He attributed this to the increasing use of starvation as a weapon of war, characterizing them as ‘the new atrocity famines.’ Subsequently, he explained the increasing use of weaponized hunger as a product of changing global political economy and an accompanying normative shift, more permissive towards starvation.^[16]

With his colleague at the World Peace Foundation, Bridget Conley, and the legal group Global Rights Compliance, de Waal pushed for stronger legal measures to call perpetrators of starvation to account.^[17]

De Waal has exposed and condemned the use of starvation as a weapon in Tigray, Ethiopia, Sudan and Gaza.^{[18] [19]}

De Waal joined Africa Watch (later renamed Human Rights Watch-Africa) in 1989, authoring reports on Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia including on starvation as a weapon of war in all three of those countries. He resigned from Africa Watch in December 1992 in protest at Human Rights Watch’s decision to support the US Operation Restore Hope, which sent American troops to Somalia.

With his colleague Rakiya Omaar, who was fired as director of Africa Watch at the same time, de Waal set up African Rights, a small human rights NGO in London. African Rights hit the headlines for its exposure of human rights violations by the international forces in Somalia.^[20]

The United Nations military attorney for the UN Operation in Somalia accused de Waal of ‘supporting the propaganda efforts of the USC [United Somali Congress]’ when he was researching a report, ‘Somalia: Human Rights Abuses by the United Nations Forces.’ The report caused particular controversy in Belgium, where the Belgian army first denied that its paratroopers were responsible for any abuses, and later admitted that they had occurred when photographic evidence emerged.^[21]

African Rights took a lead in documenting the genocide in Rwanda, publishing a report Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance, with scores of first hand testimonies within weeks of the atrocities. The testimonies were collected by Rakiya Omaar, who was in Rwanda, interviewing survivors, sometimes on the very day they escaped from the genocidaires, assisted by de Waal who was in London.

De Waal continued to work on Sudan, particularly on the then-neglected case of the Nuba Mountains, organizing the first mission to document abuses there, which led to the report, Facing Genocide: The Nuba of Sudan, and a BBC documentary by the journalist Julie Flint.^[22] De Waal reflected on the challenges of documenting genocide as it unfolds in an article in Boston Review.^[23]

In 1998 de Waal left African Rights and founded a new organization, Justice Africa, with Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem, Yoanes Ajawin and Paulos Tesfagiorgis. African Rights co-hosted a series of conferences on peace and human rights in Sudan, bringing civil society voices to the peace process.^[24]

It campaigned against the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, sponsoring a case at the African Court of Human and People’s Rights against Ethiopia for the expulsion of Eritreans. It convened workshops on the peace and security challenges facing Africa.^[25]

De Waal left Justice Africa to work on HIV and AIDS in Africa, playing a leading role in the UN Economic Commission for Africa’s Commission on HIV/AIDS and Governance in Africa,^[26] the Social Science Research Council report on AIDS, Conflict and Security,^[27] and the Harvard University-led Joint Learning Initiative on Children and HIV/AIDS.^[28] De Waal later reflected on how the worst predictions for political and security crises arising from the HIV and AIDS epidemic in Africa had turned out to be erroneous.^[29]

At the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, de Waal wrote an essay for Boston Review drawing lessons from the politics of the 1890s cholera epidemic in Hamburg, which he later expanded into a book, New Pandemics, Old Politics, arguing that each pandemic should be seen also as a societal ‘pandemy’, with subtle but far-reaching social and political implications.

De Waal has a long history of writing and activism on human rights, humanitarianism and peace in Sudan.

De Waal edited a book on radical Islam in the Horn of Africa, with a focus on Sudan, with the theme that the politics-first approach to tackling al-Qaeda in the region, led by Ethiopia, was successful in containing the threat.^[30] De Waal described the Sudan government’s assault on Darfur in 2003-04 as ‘genocide by force of habit’.^[31] With Julie Flint, he wrote a detailed account of the background and trajectory of the war.^[32] De Waal joined the African Union mediation team for the Darfur peace talks, and his edited book contains vivid first hand details about how those talks were conducted and ultimately failed.^[33]

Having condemned the Islamist government for genocidal violence and starvation in the Nuba Mountains, southern Sudan and Darfur, de Waal was highly critical of the prosecutorial strategy taken by Luis Moreno Ocampo, prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, towards Darfur. In 2008 he convened a debate on the blog, ‘Making Sense of Darfur’ on the question, ‘What if Ocampo indicts Bashir?’ with contributions from a wide range of viewpoints. It is summarized here. De Waal’s own view was that the indictment was poorly prepared and that pursuing an arrest warrant against al-Bashir would endanger democratization and peace in Sudan.

When the case against Ali Kushayb, a Janjaweed member, was opened at the ICC in 2022, de Waal was called as a joint expert witness to testify.^[34]

In 2009, de Waal joined the African Union High-Level Panel for Darfur, chaired by former South African president Thabo Mbeki. He contributed to its report and worked with its successor AU High Level Implementation Panel for Sudan until 2012.

De Waal’s book, The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa: Money, war and the business of power,introduced the concept of the ‘political marketplace’, conceptualizing the political arena as one in which political loyalties and services are bought and sold. This concept has been used to explain the political dynamics of Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia and the wider region. More controversially, de Waal argued that the Ethiopian project of the ‘developmental state’ should be seen as a bulwark against the marketization of politics in the region.

In the wake of the political reforms in Ethiopia in 2018 and the rise to power of Abiy Ahmed, de Waal posed the question of whether Ethiopia would become a political marketplace and whether it would become part of the contested ‘Red Sea Arena’ in which the interests of Middle Eastern powers would prevail over African agendas of security and development.

When the Tigray War broke out in 2020, de Waal was outspoken in condemning the Ethiopian and Eritrean violations in that war, and provided a platform for Tigrayan voices including especially Mulugeta Gebrehiwot. De Waal and Mulugeta Gebrehiwot published reports surrounding the situation in Tigray with regards to Eritrea's involvement.^[35]

• Famine that Kills : Darfur, Sudan, Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1989, ISBN 0-19-827749-0 (Revised edition, 2005, ISBN 0-19-518163-8)
• War in Sudan: An Analysis of Conflict, London : Peace in Sudan Group, 1990
• Evil days : thirty years of war and famine in Ethiopia, New York: Human Rights Watch, 1991, ISBN 1-56432-038-3
• Facing Genocide: The Nuba of Sudan, London: African Rights, July 1995, ISBN 1-899477-04-7
• Famine crimes : politics & the disaster relief industry in Africa, London : African Rights & the International African Institute, 1997, ISBN 0-253-21158-1
• Who fights? who cares?: war and humanitarian action in Africa, editor, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2000, ISBN 0-86543-864-1
• The Phoenix State: Civil Society and the Future of Sudan, Editor with A.H. Abdel Salam, 2001, ISBN 1-56902-143-0
• Demilitarizing the mind: African agendas for peace and security, Editor, Trenton, NJ & Asmara, Eritrea : Africa World Press, 2002, ISBN 0-86543-988-5
• Young Africa: realising the rights of children and youth, Editor with Nicolas Argenti, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2002, ISBN 0-86543-842-0
• When peace comes: civil society and development in Sudan, Editor with Yoanes Ajawin, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2002, ISBN 1-56902-164-3
• Islamism and its enemies in the Horn of Africa, Editor, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004, ISBN 0-253-21679-6
• Darfur : a short history of a long war, With Julie Flint, New York : Zed Books, 2005, ISBN 1-84277-697-5
• AIDS and power : Why there is no political crisis—yet, New York : Zed Books, 2006, ISBN 1-84277-707-6
• War in Darfur and the search for peace (edited), Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 2007, ISBN 978-0-674-02367-3
• The real politics of the Horn of Africa: Money, war and the business of power, Polity Press, 2015, ISBN 978-0-7456-9557-0
• Advocacy in Conflict: Critical Perspectives on Transnational Activism (edited), Zed Books.
• Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine, Polity Press, 2017 ^[36]
• New Pandemics, Old Politics: Two Hundred Years of War on Disease and its Alternatives - Polity Books (2021)
• Sudan's Unfinished Democracy w/ Justin Lynch and Alex De Waal - Published 2022.

• Alex de Waal's bio
• Appearances on C-SPAN