Liebert 2022 Alex de Waal

Alex de Waal is executive director of the World Peace Foundation, Research Professor at the Fletcher School, Tufts University, and Professorial Fellow at the London School of Economics. He has worked on the Horn of Africa and on humanitarian issues since the 1980s as a researcher and practitioner, with a special focus on famine and humanitarian crises. He served as a senior advisor to the African Union High Level Panel on Sudan and South Sudan. He was listed among Foreign Policy’s 100 most influential international intellectuals in 2008 and Atlantic’s 29 ‘brave thinkers’ in 2009. De Waal’s recent books include: The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa: Money, War and the Business of Power (Polity 2015), Mass Starvation: The history and future of famine (Polity 2018), and New Pandemics, Old Politics: 200 years of the war on disease and its alternatives (Polity 2021).

New Pandemics, Old Politics

February 18, 2022 • 6:00 pm

Edwards Hall 112

We urgently need a redefinition of “pandemic” to look beyond the individual pathogen itself and understand the societal ecology in which pandemic diseases evolve, and the societal impacts that they have. In this lecture Professor de Waal will examine how the concept of “pandemic” has been shaped by positivistic science and the attendant concept of “conquering” disease, and how this overlooks alternative understandings of health crises and approaches to health that combine human rights with evolutionary science. I critique the pervasive notion of a “war” on disease and explore how the concept of “one health” can become an emancipatory social project.

Crisis in the Horn of Africa

FGCU Student Lecture

February 18, 2022 • 10:30 am

Cohen Center Ballroom

Students register here