Posts by: Alex DeWaal

Like most contemporary wars, Sudan’s war cannot be reduced to a contest between two sides. It’s more complicated—and best understood in context of the history of the Sudanese state and its wars.

The Sudanese state was born two hundred years ago as an instrument for plundering an imperial periphery. Khartoum and its immediate environs became […]

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I’m both honored and humbled to be the 2023 recipient of the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Huxley Award. Established in 1900, the recipients include some of the luminaries of the discipline, such as Marcel Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Edward Evans-Pritchard, Mary Douglas, Pierre Bourdieu and Anna Tsing. I completed my DPhil in social anthropology in 1988 […]

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Originally published by The New York Times on August 13, 2023.

An uninterrupted swath of African countries from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea is now under military rule. Mali, Guinea, Chad, Sudan, Burkina Faso and, most recently, Niger. Some of the putschists deposed elected leaders, like Niger’s president, Mohamed Bazoum. Others forestalled […]

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Thirty years ago this week, on July 11, 1993 to be precise, a military attorney attached to the UN Operation in Somalia (UNOSOM) instructed that I should be detained.

The stated reason was that I was ‘supporting the propaganda efforts of the USC’. The United Somali Congress was the military-political organization headed by General Mohamed […]

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Many of the world’s conflicts are in places where institutions have failed and violent transactional politics rules. Often, the battlefield is only the tactical arena—what counts strategically is the material resources on which the belligerents can call. Among those material resources, what matters most are political funds—the money that can be used to buy political […]

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No group in history has been as dangerous as soldiers who feel betrayed. Whether they are conscripts, volunteers or mercenaries, the men who fought for a cause that later became reviled as failed or wrong, are neglected at great peril. From the ‘auction of the Roman empire’ in CE 193—when the wealthy senator Didius […]

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