Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation (WPF) at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, yesterday discussed ongoing conflicts in East Africa and means of effectively resolving them. The talk was held with Tufts' Education for Public Inquiry and International Citizenship (EPIIC) class in Barnum Hall.
Students in EPIIC appreciated de Waal's knowledgeable and innovative approach to the bleak situation in Sudan.
"Alex de Waal is one of the leading scholars of the Horn of Africa," EPIIC student Amy Calfas, a junior, said. "He has a very profound background studying this region and is highly respected in the international community."
"I think Alex brought a very interesting perspective to this issue," senior Amy Ouellette, a student in EPIIC, said. "He's met with many of the leaders of Sudan and can speak about their personalities. It was very cool to have a first−hand account enhance our understanding of the conflict."
De Waal is an expert in peace studies and conflict resolution in northeast Africa. Formerly, as a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, de Waal worked as part of a mediation team for the African Union in the 2008 Darfur peace agreement.
He was asked to lead WPF — which brings intellectuals with expertise in peace studies to the school to engage students in applied research and outreach programs — when the program moved from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government to The Fletcher School in July.
De Waal said he became interested in the study of refugees during his time at the University of Oxford as an undergraduate and traveled to East Africa to study the subject.
"I got engaged in the issue of human rights in the context of the famine and conflict that was going on there at the time," he said, referring to regional upheaval caused by the Ethiopian civil war and a massive drought in Sudan throughout the 1980s.
De Waal explained that democratic institutions and respect for human rights can often increase following times of war, as was the case during the American peace movement in the early part of the 20th century, but warned that such positive developments are not guaranteed. This type of post−war transformation cannot necessarily be expected to occur in places like Sudan, which has been engaged in ongoing conflict for nearly 50 years, he said.
De Waal stressed that the United States should not set high expectations during periods of international intervention, as it did in during the American invasion of Somalia in 1993.
Instead, de Waal suggested that the likelihood of success — rather than a set of established norms or rules — should determine whether states undertake humanitarian intervention.
"We shouldn't try to set norms and standards by which we intervene," he said. "Trying to establish a ‘rulebook for interventionism' is a flawed enterprise."
This notion was especially true in the case of Sudan, he said. Although Sudan has a long history of human rights abuses that merit international attention, humanitarian intervention may not be the best way to resolve Sudan's underlying political problems, he said.
De Waal said that in the Sudan crisis, negotiations between rebel leaders, the provincial and metropolitan elite and the incumbent operate as they would in a commercial marketplace, where adherence to a peace agreement can be bought. In these cases, de Waal said, outside intervention can be problematic.
The main reason the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), which was meant to end the Second Sudanese Civil War, failed was because the United Nations did not understand the extent to which this financial bargaining was happening, he explained.
Until this is resolved, de Waal believes the CPA is unlikely to be successfully implemented.
Interventionists also often fail to recognize that conflicts in Darfur are not unique to the region.
"What's going on is not just a Darfurian conflict," he said. "It is a Sudanese conflict as manifested in Darfur. We need to be part of the national process, not just the regional process."
