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 Alexander De Waal
Dr
Biographical Note:
Alex de Waal
Alex de Waal is a researcher, writer and activist on African issues. He is a fellow of the Global Equity Initiative, Harvard; director of the Social Science Research Council program on AIDS and social transformation; and a director of Justice Africa in London. In his career, he has studied the social, political and health dimensions of famine, war, genocide and the HIV/AIDS epidemic, especially in the Horn of Africa and the Great Lakes. He has been at the forefront of mobilizing African and international responses to these problems.
Dr de Waal received his DPhil in social anthropology from Oxford University in 1988 for a study of the famine of 1984-5 in Darfur, Sudan. The focus of this research was on how rural people survived famine—and were often far better at it than outsiders would have expected. The following year he joined the Africa Watch division of Human Rights Watch, and worked on a range of human rights issues in the Horn of Africa, including pioneering the study of how human rights abuses and war crimes created famine. Alex resigned from Africa Watch in December 1992 in protest at the organization’s support for the U.S. government’s dispatch of Marines to Somalia, but continued to work on issues of war, famine, and genocide in Africa. He served as the first Chairman of Mines Advisory Group from 1993-98 at the time of the launch of the international campaign to ban land mines.
Alex de Waal has not held an academic appointment, but has worked with NGOs, UN agencies and the African Union to respond to the most urgent problems of the continent. From 1997-2001 he was closely involved in the Sudan peace process and organizing Sudanese civil society organizations to face the challenges of a transition to peace and democracy. He also studied the culture of militarism among governments and opposition groups in north-east Africa, and investigated the intense if under-reported war of militant Islam and its enemies in Africa in the 1990s.
In 2001, Alex de Waal revived his earlier concerns with public health and how populations survive during crises, turning his attention to Africa’s HIV/AIDS epidemics. He had a particular concern with the intersection of HIV/AIDS, poverty and drought and coined the term “new variant famine” to describe their destructive interaction. He also worked on how the epidemic affected governance and security, developing both theoretical models and obtaining new data. This evidence led him to revise some of the earlier predictions about the disastrous impact of HIV/AIDS on Africa’s political order, and instead to inquire into how the response to the epidemic had been co-opted into existing power structures.
In 2004, Alex returned to his earliest research interest, Darfur. During 2005-06 he was seconded to the African Union Mediation team for the Darfur conflict and remains closely involved with the search for a lasting solution to the crisis in Darfur.
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