A researcher on African elite politics, Alex is the executive director of the World Peace Foundation at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Alex was the first chairman of the Mines Advisory Group at the beginning of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. He set up two human rights organisations, African Rights and Justice Africa, focusing respectively on documenting human rights abuses and developing policies to respond to human rights crises, notably in Rwanda, Somalia and Sudan. In 2005–2006, Alex was seconded to the African Union mediation team for Darfur and from 2009–12 served as senior adviser to the African Union High-Level Implementation Panel for Sudan. He was on the list of Foreign Policy’s 100 most influential public intellectuals in 2008 and Atlantic Monthly’s 27 “brave thinkers” in 2009. Alex’s many books include: Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine; The real politics of the Horn of Africa: Money, war and the business of power; War in Darfur and the search for peace (edited); and Advocacy in Conflict: Critical Perspectives on Transnational Activism (edited). He writes regular commentary on contemporary Sudan through his World Peace Foundation blog, Reinventing Peace.
