Alexander William Lowndes de Waal, is the executive director of the World Peace Foundation at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He is an authority on famine and has worked on the Horn of Africa since the 1980s as a researcher and practitioner. He was listed among Foreign Policy’s 100 most influential international intellectuals in 2008 and Atlantic’s 29 ‘brave thinkers’ in 2009 and is the winner of the Huxley Award of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 2024.