American human rights and anti-corruption activist

John Prendergast is a human rights and anti-corruption activist as well as a New York Times best-selling author. He is the Co-Founder with George Clooney of The Sentry, an investigative and policy team that follows the dirty money connected to war criminals and transnational war profiteers. John is also the Strategic Director of the Clooney Foundation for Justice.

Contents

• 1 Career
• 2 Media
• 3 Criticism
• 4 Publications
• 5 References
• 6 External links

Career

In the latter half of the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s, Prendergast worked for a variety of organizations in the U.S. and Africa, focusing primarily on peace and human rights. At the end of 1996, he joined the National Security Council as Director for African Affairs and thereafter served as a special adviser to Susan Rice at the United States Department of State. As a special adviser, Prendergast was a member of the team behind the successful two-and-a-half-year U.S. effort to broker an end to the Eritrean–Ethiopian War. He has also been part of the peace processes for Burundi, Sudan and DR Congo. Prendergast has also worked for the Clinton White House and two members of Congress, and left government in 2001 to become Special Adviser to the President of the International Crisis Group on Africa issues. Outside of government, he has worked for organizations such as the United States Ins*ute of Peace, UNICEF, and Human Rights Watch.

In 2007, alongside Gayle Smith, Prendergast co-founded the Enough Project, a policy organization aimed at countering genocide and crimes against humanity. He is also a co-founder along with George Clooney of The Sentry, an investigative initiative created to uncover the financial networks behind conflicts in Africa and whose Board of Directors includes Clooney, Don Cheadle, Matt Damon, and Brad Pitt. Together, Clooney and Prendergast had also previously co-founded the Satellite Sentinel Project, which aimed to prevent conflict and human rights abuses through satellite imagery. In 2020, Prendergast was named the Strategic Director of the Clooney Foundation for Justice. Other initiatives of Prendergast include founding the Darfur Dream Team Sister Schools Program with Tracy McGrady and other NBA stars, which funded schools in Darfurian refugee camps and created partnerships with schools in the U.S., as well as the Raise Hope for Congo campaign, highlighting the issue of conflict minerals fueling war in Congo and supporting a more comprehensive peace process.

Prendergast has been a visiting professor at many universities and colleges, including Yale Law School, Stanford University, and Columbia University. He has been awarded seven honorary doctorates, and serves as the Anne Evans Estabrook Human Rights Senior Fellow at Kean University.

Media

Prendergast has written extensively on Africa and is the author or co-author of eleven books. His latest book is Congo Stories: Battling Five Centuries of Exploitation and Greed (2018), co-aut*d with Congolese activist Fidel Bafilemba and featuring photographs by Ryan Gosling. His two books prior to that were co-aut*d with actor and activist Don Cheadle. Those are Not On Our Watch, a New York Times bestseller and NAACP non-fiction book of the year, and The Enough Moment: Fighting to End Africa's Worst Humanitarian Crimes. He is currently working on a project concerning the Democratic Republic of the Congo with Gosling and New Yorker writer Kelefa Sanneh.

Prendergast has appeared in five episodes of 60 Minutes and traveled to Africa with Dateline NBC, ABC’s Nightline, The PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and CNN’s Inside Africa, Newsweek/The Daily Beast, and The New York Times Magazine. He has also appeared in several do*entaries, including: Merci Congo, Sand and Sorrow, Darfur Now, 3 Points, and War Child. He co-produced Journey Into Sunset, and is Executive Producer of Staging Hope: Acts of Peace in Northern Uganda, both about Northern Uganda. He also appears in the Warner Brother's motion picture The Good Lie.

Jane Bussmann was inspired by his work and meetings with him to write her 2012 book The Worst Date Ever: or How it Took a Comedy Writer to Expose Joseph Kony and Africa's Secret War, a comic/tragic story of her attempt as a novice foreign correspondent to expose the truth about the war in Uganda. He is also the primary subject in another book by Bussmann, A Journey to the Dark Heart of Nameless Unspeakable Evil.

Criticism

Prendergast's activism has been criticized by Mahmood Mamdani as simplistic, counter-productive, and detrimental to the reality on the ground, especially regarding Darfur and Northern Uganda.

Publications

Prendergast in South Sudan during the Southern Sudanese independence referendum, 2011, with Kofi Annan, Jimmy Carter, and George Clooney

Articles

• "George Clooney on Sudan’s Rape of Darfur". Co-aut*d with George Clooney and Akshaya *ar. The New York Times, 25 February 2015.
• "Sanctions threats not enough in South Sudan". Co-aut*d with George Clooney and Akshaya *ar. CNN, 25 June 2015.
• "How to Destroy a War Economy". Foreign Affairs, 10 August 2015. Published by the Council on Foreign Relations.
• "War crimes shouldn’t pay in South Sudan". Co-aut*d with George Clooney. The Washington Post, 12 September 2016.
• "Stop the Cash, Stop the Conflict". Co-aut*d with George Clooney. Originally published in The Economist, 21 November 2016.
• "A New Tool to Fight Genocide". Co-aut*d with Brad Brooks-Rubin. Foreign Affairs, 15 December 2016. Published by the Council on Foreign Relations.
• "Modernize, don’t remove, Sudan’s sanctions". Co-aut*d with Brad Brooks-Rubin. The Hill, 18 January 2017.
• "Congo's violent kleptocracy at a crossroads". Co-aut*d with Sasha Lezhnev. Fox News, 4 February 2017.
• "British banks are go-betweens in global conflict. This can be stopped". Co-aut*d with George Clooney. The Guardian, 20 February 2017.
• "South Sudan’s government-made famine". Co-aut*d with George Clooney. The Washington Post, 9 March 2017.
• “The Key to Making Peace in Africa”. Co-aut*d with George Clooney. Foreign Affairs, Vol. 97, No. 2, 14 March 2018. Published by the Council on Foreign Relations.
• "Our World Runs on Resources Looted From Congo. That's Why Democratic Elections Alone Can't Solve the Country's Problems". Co-aut*d with Sasha Lezhnev. Time, 28 December 2018.
• "George Clooney and John Prendergast: Sudan needs more than words. It needs action". Co-aut*d with George Clooney. The Washington Post, 14 April 2019.
• "George Clooney & John Prendergast: Violence is the business model in South Sudan". Co-aut*d with George Clooney. USA Today, 3 October 2019.

Books

• Peace, Development, and People of the Horn of Africa. Co-aut*d with Bread for the World (Organization). Washington D.C.: Ins*ute on Hunger & Development, Center of Concern, 1992. ISBN:978-0-9628058-2-0
• Civilian Devastation: Abuses by All Parties in the War in Southern Sudan. Co-aut*d with Jemera Rone and Karen Sorensen. Human Rights Watch, 1994. ISBN:978-1-56432-129-9
• Without Troops & Tanks: The Emergency Relief Desk and the Cross Border Operation into Eritrea and Tigray. Co-aut*d by Mark R. Duffield. The Red Sea Press, 1994. ISBN:978-1-56902-003-6

• Crisis Response: Humanitarian Band-aids in Sudan and Somalia. Washington, D.C.: Center of Concern, 1997. ISBN:978-0-585-38030-8
• Frontline Diplomacy: Humanitarian Aid and Conflict in Africa. Co-aut*d with the Center of Concern. L. Rienner, 1996 ISBN:978-1-55587-696-8
• God, Oil & Country: Changing the Logic of War in Sudan. Africa Report #39. International Crisis Group, January 28, 2002.
• Blood and Soil: Land, Politics and Conflict Prevention in Zimbabwe and South Africa. International Crisis Group, 2004. ISBN:978-0-9760853-0-0
• Crafting Peace: Strategies to Deal with Warlords in Collapsing States. Co-aut*d by Sasha Lezhnev. Lexington Books, 2006. ISBN:978-0-7391-1765-1
• Not On Our Watch:: The Mission to End Genocide in Darfur and Beyond. Co-aut*d with Don Cheadle. Hyperion, 2007. ISBN:978-1-4013-0335-8
• The Enough Moment: Fighting to End Africa's Worst Human Rights Crimes. Co-aut*d by Don Cheadle. Random House, 2010. ISBN:978-0-307-46482-8
• Unlikely Brothers. Co-aut*d by Michael Mattocks. Random House, 17 May 2011. ISBN:978-0-307-46484-2
• Congo Stories: Battling Five Centuries of Exploitation and Greed. Co-aut*d by Fidel Bafilemba. Grand Central Publishing, 4 December 2018. ISBN:978-1-4555-8464-2

References

External links

• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Enough Project
• Not On Our Watch
• The Sentry
• Works by or about John Prendergast in libraries (WorldCat catalog)