​Alex de Waal is executive director of the World Peace Foundation and research professor at the Fletcher School, Tufts University. He has worked on famine, humanitarianism, and conflict, since the 1980s as a researcher and practitioner, focusing on the Horn of Africa. He has spent decades arguing that famine needs to be considered a political act and a crime. He served as a senior advisor to the African Union on Sudan and South Sudan in various capacities. He was named among Foreign Policy's 100 most influential international intellectuals (2008) and Atlantic's 29 “brave thinkers" (2009). He received the Royal Anthropological Institute's Huxley Award in 2024.