Alex de Waal is a program director at the SSRC, engaged in projects on HIV/AIDS and Social Transformation and on Emergencies and Humanitarian Action. He is also a fellow of the Global Equity Initiative at Harvard, which is a partner in a consortium with the SSRC working on AIDS and governance issues, and he is director of Justice Africa, London. In his twenty-year career, de Waal has studied the social, political and health dimensions of famine, war, genocide and the HIV/AIDS epidemic, especially in the Horn of Africa and the Great Lakes. He has been at the forefront of mobilizing African and international responses to these problems. De Waal's 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 (Zed, 2005) and AIDS and Power: Why There is No Political Crisis Yet (Zed, 2006). De Waal earned his doctorate in social anthropology from Oxford University.