Alexander William Lowndes de Waal (born 22 February 1963), is the executive director of the World Peace Foundation at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.
He was listed among Foreign Policy’s 100 most influential international intellectuals in 2008 and Atlantic’s 29 ‘brave thinkers’ in 2009 and is the winner of the Huxley Award of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 2024.
[11] This book influenced a generation of researchers, students and aid practitioners to think critically about role of humanitarians in obscuring the underlying reasons for famine.
[18] [19] De Waal joined Africa Watch (later renamed Human Rights Watch-Africa) in 1989, authoring reports on Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia including on starvation as a weapon of war in all three of those countries.
The testimonies were collected by Rakiya Omaar, who was in Rwanda, interviewing survivors, sometimes on the very day they escaped from the genocidaires, assisted by de Waal who was in London.
[23] In 1998 de Waal left African Rights and founded a new organization, Justice Africa, with Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem, Yoanes Ajawin and Paulos Tesfagiorgis.
[28] De Waal later reflected on how the worst predictions for political and security crises arising from the HIV and AIDS epidemic in Africa had turned out to be erroneous.
De Waal edited a book on radical Islam in the Horn of Africa, with a focus on Sudan, with the theme that the politics-first approach to tackling al-Qaeda in the region, led by Ethiopia, was successful in containing the threat.
In 2008 he convened a debate on the blog, ‘Making Sense of Darfur’ on the question, ‘What if Ocampo indicts Bashir?’ with contributions from a wide range of viewpoints.
De Waal’s own view was that the indictment was poorly prepared and that pursuing an arrest warrant against al-Bashir would endanger democratization and peace in Sudan.
When the case against Ali Kushayb, a Janjaweed member, was opened at the ICC in 2022, de Waal was called as a joint expert witness to testify.