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Alexander William Lowndes de Waal (22 February 1963) is a British writer and researcher on African issues. He was a fellow of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative at Harvard University, as well as program director at the Social Science Research Council on AIDS in New York City. De Waal is also a co-director of Justice Africa, London.

His father is Rev.d Dr Victor de Waal, Dean of Canterbury from 1976 to 1986 and his brother Edmund de Waal is a ceramic artist. De Waal was educated at The King's School, Canterbury and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he read Psychology with Philosophy. He received a D.Phil. in social anthropology at Nuffield College, Oxford for his thesis on the 1984-5 Darfur famine in Sudan. The next year he joined the Africa division of Human Rights Watch, only to resign in December 1992 in protest for HRW's support for the American military involvement in Somalia. He was the first chairman of the Mines Advisory Group at the beginning of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. From 1997 to 2001, he focused on avenues to peaceful resolution of the Second Sudanese Civil War. In 2001, he returned to his work on health in Africa, writing on the intersection of HIV/AIDS, poverty and drought. In 2004, he returned to his doctoral thesis topic of Darfur as the conflict there worsened. During 2005 and 2006, de Waal was seconded to the African Union mediation team for Darfur. In 2008 he became well-known as a critic of the International Criminal Court's decision to seek an arrest warrant for Sudanese president Omar al Bashir.Today he is considered as one of the foremost experts on Sudan and Darfur in particular.

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