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Alex de Waal

Alex de Waal is programme director at the Social Science Research Council and the author, with Julie Flint, of Darfur: A Short History of a Long War.

From the London Review dated 5 August 2004

Counter-Insurgency on the Cheap

“The atrocities carried out by the Janjawiid are aimed at speakers of Fur, Tunjur, Masalit and Zaghawa. They are systematic and sustained; the effect, if not the aim, is grossly disproportionate to the military threat of the rebellion. The mass rape and branding of victims speaks of the destruction of a community. But this is not the genocidal campaign of a government at the height of its ideological hubris, as the 1992 jihad against the Nuba was . . . This is the routine cruelty of a security cabal, its humanity withered by years in power: it is genocide by force of habit.” [ read more . . . ]

Selected bibliography

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In the LRB archive

‘I will not sign’ · 30 November 2006

subscriber-only content Chasing Ghosts · 18 August 2005

Counter-Insurgency on the Cheap · 5 August 2004

subscriber-only content The Unwritten Sociology of HIV · 19 June 2003

  • Aids in the 21st Century: Disease and Globalisation by Tony Barnett and Alan Whiteside

subscriber-only content The Moral Solipsism of Global Ethics Inc · 23 August 2001

  • Like Water on Stone: The Story of Amnesty International by Jonathan Power
  • Future Positive: International Co-operation in the 21st Century by Michael Edwards
  • East Meets West: Human Rights and Democracy in East Asia by Daniel Bell

Not currently in the LRB archive

 not available in archive ‘We do deserts, we don’t do mountains’ · 11 November 1999

  • Soldiers of Diplomacy: The United Nations, Peacekeeping and the New World Order by Jocelyn Coulon
  • Hard Choices: Moral Dilemmas in Humanitarian Intervention edited by Jonathan Moore
  • New and Old Wars: Organised Violence in the Global Era by Mary Kaldor

 not available in archive Dangers of Discretion · 21 January 1999

  • Dunant’s Dream: War, Switzerland and the History of the Red Cross by Caroline Moorehead
  • The Warrior’s Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience by Michael Ignatieff

From the LRB letters page