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
Originally published by Foreign Affairs, September 18, 2023.
In 2003, mass atrocities in Sudan’s Darfur region shocked the world. A coalition of human rights organizations mobilized in response, accusing Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir and his Janjaweed militia of genocide. Although the United Nations did eventually dispatch troops to protect Sudanese civilians, the response was […]
Continue Reading →Guy Gabriel
More peacebuilders does not mean more peace. There are numerous diplomatic tracks hoping to lead to peace in Sudan at present, each one pitched differently to the others, each with merits and demerits. But that there are numerous concurrent tracks does not amount to a surfeit of peace, so much as its lack. […]
Continue Reading →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 […]
Continue Reading →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 […]
Continue Reading →Mohamed Hamdan Dagolo, known as ‘Hemedti’, attracts a horrified fascination. A man of humble origins, who rose through military prowess, has a great city at his mercy. His story evokes great historical antecedents such as the Turko-Mongol conqueror Timur (1336-1405). Timur led an army of nomads that conquered Persia, captured and sacked Delhi, defeated the […]
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