Alex de Waal is executive director of the World Peace Foundation and Research Professor at the Fletcher School, Tufts University. He has worked on the Horn of Africa, and on famine, conflict, and related issues since the 1980s as a researcher and practitioner. He served as a senior advisor to the African Union on Sudan and South Sudan. He was listed among Foreign Policy’s 100 most influential international intellectuals in 2008 and Atlantic’s 29 ‘brave thinkers’ in 2009. He is the recipient of the Huxley Award of the Royal Anthropological Institute for 2024. De Waal’s recent books include The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa: Money, war and the business of power (Polity 2015); Mass Starvation: The history and future of famine (Polity 2018), New Pandemics, Old Politics: 200 years of the war on disease and its alternatives (Polity 2021), and (with Willow Berridge, Justin Lynch and Raga Makawi), Sudan’s Unfinished Democracy: The promise and betrayal of a people’s revolution (Hurst 2022).

Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?

I work mostly in two fields — the study of famines and the politics of the Horn of Africa. Today, they converge in a deeply worrying way. The study of mass starvation, long dormant in the academy, is stirring again for the unfortunate reason that famines are making a comeback. The sharp end of acute food crises is the use of hunger as a weapon of war. And famine is itself a ‘polycrisis’ — it’s more than an aggregate of malnutrition and child mortality, it is a profound and traumatic societal transformation.

The epicentre of famine-related polycrisis is the Horn of Africa. The entire region is currently facing state failure and armed conflict — including transnational conflicts waged by proxy — alongside collapse of food and livelihood systems. Reasons include the layers of unresolved political conflicts, precarious livelihoods, and the way in which the ‘Red Sea Arena’ has become a theatre for regional and global political-economic power contestation.

Today, many research questions that preoccupied scholars and students of both food security and northeast Africa over the last twenty years are looking either less relevant, or need to be reframed. For example, debates over international intervention and the use of force to protect civilians in humanitarian emergencies, over state-building, and combating violent extremism, are being superseded by interest in starvation crimes, the ethnography of political elites, and the ways in which global power contests are shifting the burden of hardship to vulnerable communities.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

One of the things that hasn’t changed is my enduring scepticism and critique of the value systems of the most powerful states — particularly the US and UK — as they protect their interests and project their power. I quit Human Rights Watch in opposition to the US ‘Operation Restore Hope’ in Somalia in 1992, asking, are the US Marine Corps the stormtroopers of philanthropic imperialism or the vanguard of a (progressive) humanitarian international? (Mostly the former, I thought.)

But my early-career critiques of humanitarianism underestimated the capability of liberal emergency relief systems to professionalize and save lives and livelihoods at scale, and the readiness of individual humanitarians to reflect on their political-ethical predicament. International relief assistance contributed to astonishing successes in reducing the incidence and lethality of famine worldwide from the mid-1980s to the early 2010s. Comparable observations hold for the international human rights movement, including, among other things, the International Criminal Court, which I believed overreached under its first prosecutor. At the millennium, many vocal proponents of humanitarian action and human rights were undoubtedly dazzled by the promises of liberal utopia and tended to forget that these agendas were also rooted in the struggles of colonized people for emancipation from the Euro-American imperium. The liberal interventionism of that era was hubristic. Both its champions and its critics (including myself) often succumbed to telling simplified morality tales. Looking back, it’s clear that the humanitarians kept at least one foot on solid normative ground.

Israel’s war of annihilation in Gaza is our moral litmus test. The metrics, practices and norms of humanitarian and human rights have all proven their value. I have written that it is the most intense episode of mass starvation since World War Two, in the exact sense of the most rapid reduction of a specific population from a condition in which acute malnutrition is statistically insignificant, to one in which food emergency........

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