Posts by: Alex DeWaal
Sudan’s civil war is senseless but was forseeable. The prospect of street fighting in the national capital, comparable to Mogadishu in 1991 or Tripoli in 2012, was too awful to contemplate, especially given the reputation of the metropolitan Sudanese for restraint within their heartland. But any frank analysis of the logic of Sudanese politics pointed […]
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Sudan’s war-makers refuse to learn from history. Time and again they seem to believe, despite every piece of evidence from the country’s sorry history of conflict and destruction, that using force will solve their problems. I have listened to Sudanese generals, politicians and rebel commanders, explaining why war is unavoidable, or necessary, or even desirable. […]
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There’s a lot of bad analysis around the current “world food crisis” and the purported threat of “Biblical famines” globally. The World Peace Foundation program on mass starvation clarifies.
Last year, UN Secretary General António Guterres cited figures of 276 million people worldwide who were food insecure and an increase in food prices […]
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Alex de Waal
“Re-introducing the Political Marketplace to Ethiopia” is available in both English and Amharic (see below).
Re-introducing the Political Marketplace to Ethiopia
I first began developing the concept of a ‘political marketplace’ fifteen years ago. I argued that the dominant concepts of statebuilding—the international project of creating governmental […]
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There has been much discussion over the last two weeks of imminent African Union peace talks aimed at ending the war in Tigray, followed by reports of the talks’ postponement supposedly for reasons of logistical problems. In fact, the AU did not have a plan for serious peace talks. Hand-in-glove with the Federal Government […]
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Annotating the Official Script
This blog post is a commentary on a press briefing and three documents that reveal the thinking of key international actors regarding the war against Tigray conducted by the Federal Government of Ethiopia and the State of Eritrea. The four documents are:
Press briefing by U.S. Special Envoy Mike Hammer, […]
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