Posts by: Alex DeWaal

Sept 16, 2023 address to Conference, ‘Towards a Sustainable Future for the Oromo Nation: Evaluating the Failed State of Ethiopia, Safeguarding Oromo National Interests, and Fostering Lasting Peace.’

First of all, let me offer my condolences to all of you who have lost loved ones during the conflict that is ravaging Oromiya, and Ethiopia as […]

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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 […]

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Alex de Waal

Selecting a title for their book, Tobias Hagmann and Finn Stepputat chose ‘Trade makes States.’ It’s an obvious riff on the famous line by Charles Tilly, ‘war made the state, and the state made war,’ which has preoccupied historians, especially of Europe. In much of the world, of course, war […]

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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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