Alex de Waal

During 2005–06, de Waal was seconded to the African Union mediation team for Darfur, and from 2009–12 served as senior adviser to the African Union High-Level Implementation Panel for Sudan. 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.

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

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. 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. 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 1988, de Waal received a D.Phil in social anthropology at Nuffield College, Oxford for his thesis on the 1984-5 Darfur famine in Sudan. This research formed the basis of his book, Famine That Kills: Darfur, Sudan (1989). The following year he joined the Africa division of Human Rights Watch, only to resign in December 1992 in protest for HRW's support for the American military involvement in Somalia.

He is the son of Esther Aline (née Lowndes-Moir), a writer on religion, and Rev. Dr Victor de Waal, Dean of Canterbury from 1976 to 1986. His siblings include barrister John de Waal, ceramic artist and writer Edmund de Waal, and Caucasus expert Thomas de Waal.

Alexander William Lowndes "Alex" 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.