Staff

Alex de Waal is the Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and Professorial Fellow at the London School of Economics. Considered one of the foremost experts on Sudan and the Horn of Africa, his scholarly work and practice has also probed humanitarian crisis and response, human rights, HIV/AIDS and governance in Africa, and conflict and peace-building. His latest book is New Pandemics, Old Politics: Two Hundred Years of War on Disease and its Alternatives. He is also he author of Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine and The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa (Polity Press, 2015) Click for a full list of his publications. Following a fellowship with the Global Equity Initiative at Harvard (2004-06), he worked with the Social Science Research Council as Director of the program on HIV/AIDS and Social Transformation, and led projects on conflict and humanitarian crises in Africa (2006-09). During 2005-06, de Waal was seconded to the African Union mediation team for Darfur and from 2009-11 served as senior adviser to the African Union High-Level Implementation Panel for Sudan. He was on the list of Foreign Policy’s 100 most influential public intellectuals in 2008 and Atlantic Monthly’s 27 “brave thinkers” in 2009.

Prof. Alex de Waal regularly teaches a course on Conflict in Africa at the Fletcher School, Tufts University.  During this course, students should gain a deeper understanding of the nature of contemporary violent conflict in Africa. Students will be expected to master the key theoretical approaches to violence in Africa, and to become familiar with a number of important case studies. The focus is on the origins and nature of violence, rather than policy responses and solutions. The course is inter-disciplinary and involves readings in political science, international relations, and social anthropology, while also touching on economics, environmental studies, and history.  

Alex.deWaal@tufts.edu
617) 627-2239

Publications by Alex de Waal

Bridget Conley is the Research Director of the World Peace Foundation and Associate Research Professor at The Fletcher School. At WPF, she is the lead researcher on WPF’s program, “Protecting Vulnerable Groups,” and program manager for the Global Arms and Corruption projects. She works closely with the Executive Director on project development, fundraising and strategic vision for WPF.

Currently, her research focuses on “Tracking COVID-19 in Detention”. She is lead editor on the Accountability for Starvation volume, due out in 2022 from Oxford University Press. Her previous research examined memory following mass atrocities, which culminated in her book, Memory from the Margins: Ethiopia’s Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum (Palgrave 2019), and comparative studies of how mass atrocities end. She is the editor of How Mass Atrocities End: Studies from Guatemala, Burundi, Indonesia, the Sudans, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Iraq (Cambridge University Press 2016). She has also published on issues related to starvation crimes, the 1992 – 1995 war in Bosnia, mass atrocities and genocide, and how museums can engage on human rights issues.

At Tufts, she won two university supported grants supporting interdisciplinary research projects and in 2020-2021, was a Faculty Fellow at the Jonathon M. Tisch College of Civic Life. Her project is,  “Connecting people to resources: A Proposal to Support the Tufts Educational Re-entry Network,” developed in conversation with the Tufts University Prison Initiative at Tisch College.

She previously worked as Research Director for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Committee on Conscience, where she led the Museum’s research and projects on contemporary threats of genocide, acting as a producer of multimedia public outreach materials, formulating the Museum’s positions on contemporary threats of genocide, and curating an exhibition, From Memory to Action: Meeting the Challenge of Genocide Today. She received a PhD in Comparative Literature from Binghamton University in 2001.  

At the Fletcher School, Prof. Bridget Conley taught a course Understanding Mass Atrocities; which was offered as an undergraduate course in Fall 2019 to incarcerated students at MCI-Concord through the Tufts University Prison Initiative at Tisch College. She also co-taught an undergraduate course on ethics and activism.Starting in Spring 2021, she has taught a graduate course on critical theory and International Relations at The Fletcher School. 

Bridget.Conley@tufts.edu

Publications by Bridget Conley

Lisa Avery is Associate Director of the World Peace Foundation. Lisa was previously employed as Administrative Specialist, Purchaser and Executive Assistant at Good Earth Teas in Santa Cruz, California.  She graduated from Framingham State University as a Liberal Arts major and has a Master’s Degree in Nonprofit Management from Northeastern University.

Lisa.Avery@tufts.edu
(617) 627-2255

B. Arneson is the Director for WPF’s Global Arms and Corruption Program. She also is a Research Coordinator for the Corruption Tracker, an up-to-date, online database of all cases and robust allegations of corruption in the global arms trade. She is also the Founder of Paperbacks for Perpetrators, a project that provides books to individuals who are incarcerated in the US. B got her MSc in the Politics of Conflict, Rights, and Justice at SOAS, University of London. Her previous research and grassroots organizing has focused on LGBTQ+ rights, the occupation of Palestine, drone warfare in the MENA region, and the US prison-industrial complex. 

B.Arneson@tufts.edu