Social Science Research Council
Alex de Waal is a program director of the Social Science Research Council, a senior fellow of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, and a director of Justice Africa in London. He started his research career on the Horn of Africa in 1984 with a study of the famine in Darfur and subsequently studied the social, political and health dimensions of famine, war, genocide and the HIV/AIDS epidemic. He was co-founder and co-director of African Rights (1992-98), chairman of Mines Advisory Group (1993-98), initiator of the Commission on HIV/AIDS and Governance in Africa (2002-03), and a fellow of the Global Equity Initiative at Harvard (2004-06). In 2006 Alex served as advisor to the African Union mediation team for the Darfur conflict.
Dr de Waal received his DPhil from Oxford University in 1988 and has written or edited thirteen books. Among them are, Famine that Kills: Darfur, Sudan, 1984-1985 (Clarendon Press, 1989); Facing Genocide: The Nuba of Sudan (African Rights, 1995); Food and Power in Sudan (African Rights, 1997); Famine Crimes: Politics and the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa (James Currey, 1997); Demilitarizing the Mind: African Agendas for Peace and Security (Africa World Press, 2002); Islamism and Its Enemies in the Horn of Africa (Hurst 2004), AIDS and Power: Why There is No Political Crisis-Yet (Zed, 2006); War in Darfur and the Search for Peace (Harvard University Press 2007); and (with Julie Flint), Darfur: A New History of a Long War (revised edition, Zed, 2008). In the UK New Year's Honors for 2009, Alex was awarded an OBE.
The last ten years has been a remarkable experiment in using official development assistance (ODA) as a motor for development in Africa (and other developing countries too). It has been a bonanza for the aid industry and especially the favoured elements such as HIV/AIDS, which have often found themselves in the remarkable situation in which [...]
Read the rest of The Beginning of the End for ODA?.Conventional peacekeeping operations are designed as stop-gap measures, either for a brief period of time or with a limited brief in a frozen conflict. This can be functional if the peacekeepers are dealing with institutionalized belligerents, with functioning hierarchies. It worked in the Ethio-Eritrean conflict, as for example in Cyprus. But in so-called ‘fragile states’, [...]
Read the rest of Peacekeeping in the Political Marketplace.The trial of the Congolese militia leader Thomas Lubanga Dyilo finally opened in The Hague yesterday. He is charged on six counts of recruiting and using child soldiers in the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Those listening to the opening statement of the ICC Prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, might have been forgiven for [...]
The ideals of American democracy, and the spirit of African liberation, have been intimately linked for more than half a century. At pivotal historic moments the two have intersected. In the 1950s, inspired by Mahatma Gandhi, Kwame Nkrumah was a proponent of non-violent “positive action” and he and his fellow African nationalists saw their cause as inextricably linked to the efforts for emancipation in the U.S.
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