Professional Affiliation

Executive Director, World Peace Foundation

Expert Bio

Alex de Waal is executive director of the World Peace Foundation and Research Professor at the Fletcher School, Tufts University. He has worked on the Horn of Africa, and on famine, conflict, and related issues since the 1980s as a researcher and practitioner. He served as a senior advisor to the African Union on Sudan and South Sudan in various capacities. He was listed among Foreign Policy’s 100 most influential international intellectuals in 2008 and Atlantic’s 29 ‘brave thinkers’ in 2009. He is the recipient of the Huxley Award of the Royal Anthropological Institute for 2024.

 

De Waal’s recent books include: The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa: Money, war and the business of power (Polity 205); Mass Starvation: The history and future of famine (Polity 2018), New Pandemics, Old Politics: 200 years of the war on disease and its alternatives (Polity 2021), and (with Willow Berridge, Justin Lynch and Raga Makawi), Sudan’s Unfinished Democracy: The promise and betrayal of a people’s revolution (Hurst 2022). His next book is Negotiating the Sudans: The African Union High Level Panels 2009-2014, (with Willow Berridge, forthcoming Cornell University Press 2025).