# Alex de Waal **Alexander William Lowndes de Waal (b. 22 February 1963, Cambridge)**, Executive Director of the **World Peace Foundation** and Research Professor at **The Fletcher School, Tufts University**. He is the researcher who established, against the grain of every fundraising appeal of the period, that the [[Ethiopian Famine of 1983-1985]] was substantially manufactured — and he has spent thirty-five years generalising the argument. ## The career BA in psychology with philosophy, Corpus Christi College, Oxford (1984); DPhil in social anthropology, Nuffield College, Oxford (1988), on how rural Sudanese communities understood and coped with famine. Africa Watch / [[Human Rights Watch]]-Africa **1989–1992**; co-founder of African Rights (1992–98) and Justice Africa (1998–); fellow of the Harvard Global Equity Initiative (2004–06); director of the HIV/AIDS and Social Transformation programme at the Social Science Research Council (2006–09). He was **seconded to the African Union mediation team for Darfur in 2005–06** and served as senior adviser to the AU High-Level Implementation Panel for [[Sudan]] from 2009 to 2011, contributing to the South Sudan independence negotiations. Recognitions include Foreign Policy's 100 most influential public intellectuals (2008), the Elsevier Atlas Prize (2017), and the Royal Anthropological Institute's Huxley Award (2024). ## The argument **Famines are political events, not shortages.** From *Mass Starvation* (Polity, 2017): at least **100 million people died in great famines in the 140 years from 1870 to 2010, almost all of them before 1980** — a near-elimination followed by a recent resurgence. He treats the Ukrainian famine of the early 1930s, the Nazi *Hungerplan* and the Great Leap Forward as components of deliberate strategy rather than natural disasters, and argues that the modern return of mass starvation is a political failure that political action can reverse. **The major works:** - ***Famine that Kills: Darfur, Sudan, 1984–1985*** (1989) — famine as "a threat to a way of life" rather than simply mass death, grounded in what affected people themselves say they are protecting. - ***Evil Days: 30 Years of War and Famine in Ethiopia*** (Africa Watch / Human Rights Watch, 1 September 1991) — de Waal as principal investigator. The finding that **"something over half of this mortality can be attributed to human rights abuses causing the famine to come earlier, strike harder, and extend further."** - ***Famine Crimes: Politics and the Disaster Relief Industry in Africa*** (1997) — the critique of humanitarian organisations for obscuring the political dimensions of famine, and the intellectual basis of the case against the [[Live Aid]] model. - ***The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa: Money, War and the Business of Power*** (2015) and ***Mass Starvation*** (2017). ## The political marketplace His framework for states where "kleptocratic transactional politics trump institutions and laws": outcomes are driven by discretionary **"political budgets"** and by the going rate for buying loyalties, services and offices. Applied to peacemaking, corruption, uprisings and famine alike, its sharpest prediction concerns what happens when the political budget runs low — notably when oil revenues fall — and the ruling elite substitutes repression for payment. > [!important] ⭐ Why this vault should carry him > De Waal reaches a conclusion the American right also holds — that humanitarian aid can entrench the government causing the suffering — and reaches it from the opposite direction and thirty years earlier. He is the test case for whether a shared conclusion implies a shared argument. It does not: the aid-sceptic position on the right generally ends at *therefore spend less*, while de Waal's ends at *therefore prosecute starvation as a crime and build the accountability that would make aid unnecessary.* **Agreement on a finding is not agreement on anything, and the vault should record where the two paths diverge rather than treating the overlap as vindication of either.** ## Now He works on starvation as a method of warfare in **Tigray, Sudan, Ethiopia and Gaza**, arguing for stronger legal accountability. On [[Tigray War]] he assessed the situation as "probably as bad or worse than the situation in 1984," projected "half a million people or more dying of starvation in the coming year if there isn't prompt action," and warned that **"the norm against starvation as a weapon is evaporating fast."** ## See also [[Ethiopian History Hub]] · [[Ethiopian Famine of 1983-1985]] · [[Live Aid]] · [[Tigray War]] · [[Derg]] · [[Human Rights Watch]]