Below is a round-up of recent news analysis and media commentary from the WPF’s Executive Director, Alex de Waal, a leading expert on mass starvation and famine. In the past weeks, he has discussed starvation crimes in Gaza (Occupied Palestinian Territories), Sudan, Tigray (Ethiopia) and the Horn of Africa.
Gaza
In his 1906 Handbook for Small Wars, Colonel Sir Charles Callwell advised his fellow British officers that colonial operations would likely involve confiscating cattle and burning villages, ‘an aspect that may shock the humanitarian.’ He continues:
The most satisfactory way of bringing such [native] foes to reason is by the rifle and the sward, […]
Yanis Yaroufakis’s Technofeudalism is a brilliant book. Let me propose an additional chapter and theme: militarism.
Let me suggest that today’s ‘cloudalists’—the owners of internet platforms—are the offspring of America’s techno-military complex and their system of ‘cloud capitalism’ is itself reproducing that permanent war economy.
Yaroufakis’s insight is that capitalism has been captured by […]
Continue Reading →In a paper published today, I frame the crisis in Red Sea Arena as the point of impact of contending war economies. The newly-expanded club of the BRICS, now including Red Sea Arena Middle Powers (RAMPs), are challenging the Pax Americana and its allies, but are also in contest with one another. Intersecting fractures are […]
Continue Reading →It is now fifteen months since the Federal Government of Ethiopia and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front signed the ‘Agreement for Lasting Peace through a Permanent Cessation of Hostilities’ in Pretoria, South Africa. It is fourteen months since they signed the Nairobi Declaration on the modalities for its implementation.
Essay originally drafted for the WPF seminar, ‘What Animates and Challenges the Possibilities for Collective Action today?‘ held in September 2023.
Can war be environmentally sustainable? Since coming across the idea of environmentally friendly weapons for the first time in 2020, this question has grown and morphed and played with me in so many ways. […]
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