The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Alex de Waal, researcher, writer and activist on African issues.He is a fellow of the Global Equity Initiative, Harvard; director of the Social Science Research Council program on AIDS and social transformation; and a director of Justice Africa in London.
One book included in his entry:
De Waal is a fellow of the Global Equity Initiative, Harvard; director of the Social Science Research Council program on AIDS and social transformation; and a director of Justice Africa in London.I am ... reading the third part of an ethnographic trilogy on the Uduk people of southern Blue Nile, a frontier area of northern Sudan that abuts both southern Sudan and Ethiopia. This is Wendy James’s War and Survival in Sudan’s Frontierlands: Voices from the Blue Nile (Oxford 2007)..... War and Survival is a treasure trove for those wanting to understand what wars in Sudan (such as in Darfur) really mean. One of the themes that emerges strongly is that the Uduk people tend not to assess an individual by which side he took in the war, but by his personal behavior — decency or cruelty when he had the power of life or death over people in his charge. [read on]
His books include: Famine that Kills: Darfur, Sudan, 1984-5 (Oxford University Press, 1989), and Facing Genocide: The Nuba of Sudan (African Rights, 1995). He is the editor and lead author of Islam and Its Enemies in the Horn of Africa (Indiana, 2004), and most recently author, with Julie Flint, of Darfur: A Short History of a Long War, 2d ed (Zed, 2008) and AIDS and Power: Why There is No Political Crisis Yet (Zed, 2006). De Waal earned his doctorate in social anthropology from Oxford University.
Writers Read: Alex de Waal.
--Marshal Zeringue
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