Alex de Waal

Alexander William Lowndes de Waal (22 February 1963) is a British writer and researcher on African issues. 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. De Waal is currently director of the World Peace Foundation at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He is also a co-director of Justice Africa, London.

His father is Rev.d Dr Victor de Waal, Dean of Canterbury from 1976 to 1986 and his brother Edmund de Waal is a ceramic artist.

De Waal was educated at The King's School, Canterbury and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he read Psychology with Philosophy.^{[citation needed]} He received a D.Phil. in social anthropology at Nuffield College, Oxford for his thesis on the 1984-5 Darfur famine in Sudan. The next year he joined the Africa division of Human Rights Watch, only to resign in December 1992 in protest for HRW's support for the American military involvement in Somalia. He was the first chairman of the Mines Advisory Group at the beginning of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. From 1997 to 2001, he focused on avenues to peaceful resolution of the Second Sudanese Civil War. In 2001, he returned to his work on health in Africa, writing on the intersection of HIV/AIDS, poverty and drought. In 2004, he returned to his doctoral thesis topic of Darfur as the conflict there worsened. During 2005 and 2006, de Waal was seconded to the African Union mediation team for Darfur. In 2008 he became well known as a critic of the International Criminal Court's decision to seek an arrest warrant for Sudanese president Omar al Bashir. Today he is considered as one of the foremost experts on Sudan and Darfur in particular.

He is a editor of the African Arguments book series published by Zed Books with Richard Dowden, Director of the Royal African Society. de Waal also writes and published regular commentary on contemporary Sudan through his African Arguments blog Making Sense of Sudan

Published works

Books

• 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

Articles

• Transcript of Seminar Eight - Discussion with Alex de Waal, Bard College, 11 March 2000
• "'New Variant Famine': AIDS and Food Crisis in Southern Africa," The Lancet, 11 October 2003, [1]
• "Counter-Insurgency on the Cheap", London Review of Books, 5 August 2004
• "Who are the Darfurians? Arab and African Identities, Violence and External Engagement", SSRC and GEI, Harvard, Dec 10, 2004
• "Review of Gerard Prunier, Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide, Hurst and Co.", The Times Literary Supplement, 8 August 2005
• "Chasing Ghosts: Alex de Waal on the rise and fall of militant Islam in the Horn of Africa", London Review of Books, 18 August 2005
• "Sudan's chance", Prospect, August 2005
• "Personal View on Darfur Peace Talks", United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 4 May 2006
• An Imperfect Storm: Narratives of Calamity in a Liberal-Technocratic Age Jun 11, 2006
• "Darfur’s fragile peace", opendemocracy.net, 5 July 2006
• "The Book Was Closed Too Soon on Peace in Darfur, The Guardian, 29 September 2006
• "´I will not sign´", London Review of Books, 30 November 2006
• "The Wars of Sudan", The Nation, March 1, 2007
• "No Such Thing as Humanitarian Intervention", Harvard International Review, March 21, 2007

External links

• SSRC biography
• Justice Africa
• Making Sense of Sudan Alex de Waal's blog on Sudan, on the Social Science Research Council website