Alex de Waal

Alexander William Lowndes de Waal (born 22 February 1963), a British researcher on African elite politics, is the executive director of the World Peace Foundation at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

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.

De Waal was the chairman of the Mines Advisory Group between 1993 and 1998.

De Waal set up two human rights organisations, African Rights (1993) and Justice Africa (1999), focusing respectively on documenting human rights abuses and developing policies to respond to human rights crises, notably in Rwanda, Somalia and Sudan.

In 1997, the Mines Advisory Group was co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize as a founding member of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.

His book, Famine Crimes: Politics and the Disaster Relief Industry was published in 1997.

Foreign Affairs described the book as "A powerful critique of the international humanitarian agencies dominating famine relief in Africa."

African Rights, which mainly dealt with the situation in Rwanda, has later come under criticism.

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.

As the conflict worsened in 2004, he returned to his doctoral thesis topic of Darfur.

Additionally, he believed that the "ICC arrest warrant will lead to pre-emptive military action in Darfur, a reversal of the recent gains for civil and political rights, further restrictions on the UN and humanitarian operations, and an end to the [Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2004]".

During 2005 and 2006, de Waal was seconded to the African Union mediation team for Darfur.

During 2005–06, de Waal was seconded to the African Union mediation team for Darfur, and from 2009 to 2012 served as senior adviser to the African Union High-Level Implementation Panel for Sudan.

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, arguing that while Bashir was guilty of heinous crimes the 14 July 2008 Public Application charging him was poorly written and too weak to achieve a conviction.

He was on the list of Foreign Policy's 100 most influential public intellectuals in 2008 and Atlantic Monthly's 27 "brave thinkers" in 2009.

He is an 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 World Peace Foundation blog Reinventing Peace.

Luc Reydams argued in 2016 that "African Rights was instrumental in shaping and spreading an easily consumable one-sided narrative of the Rwandan conflict".

In November 2020 he wrote an article on the Tigray War involving Ethiopian federal powers and the TPLF, in which he quoted prime minister Abiy Ahmed calling the TPLF a criminal junta.

He suggested the conflict would cause prospects for peace, democracy, and protection from famine to be set back a generation.

On 23 January 2024, de Waal said that Israel was committing a war crime through enforced starvation in the Gaza Strip, stating, "An entire population being reduced to this stage is really unprecedented. We haven’t seen it in Ethiopia, in Sudan and Yemen – pretty much anywhere else in the world."

In the outset of the Tigray War, de Waal and Mulugeta Gebrehiwot published reports surrounding the situation in Tigray with regards to Eritrea's involvement.