The Precarious State of Famine Research

Abstract

In 2017 famine struck yet again. While famine continues to haunt many fragile countries, the paper reveals a faltering scholarly interest in famine research, particularly within the research tradition of development studies. Today, the research field is rather dominated by the research traditions of history and economics. Interestingly, the steepest decline in scholarly attention to famine coincided with Amartya Sen being awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1998 in part for his work on famine. The paper points to three characteristics of famine research that might account for this rather puzzling development: (i) the field of contemporary famine research exhibits limited interest in theory-building; (ii) the field is impeded by inaccessibility to key research sites; and (iii) the field is weakened by a small and dispersed research community. The paper suggests remedies that might address these obstacles to contemporary famine research in development studies. To facilitate more theoretical development, scholars could engage with the recent call for a criminalisation of famine, and the broader field of disaster research could be used as an institutional catalyst for scholars of famine.

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this draft was presented to the Danish Institute for International Studies in connection with the South Sudan Famine (10 May 2017). I want to thank the panel, Jairo Munive Rincon (Senior Researcher), Anders Bastholm (Danish Refugee Council), and Jakob Eilsøe Mikkelsen (Save the Children) for some interesting discussions and inputs. I am also grateful for the constructive comments and suggestions from the two anonymous referees at JDS.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Comparing the number of yearly social science famine publications in the period 1960–2016 in the Web of Science Social Science Citation Index with that of Scopus, another database that includes a broader variety of publications such as books, chapters, and conference papers, results in a highly significant correlation coefficient of around 90 per cent. Any conceivable bias from excluding books, chapters, and conference papers is bound to be miniscule: only one famine publication in `0 included in Scopus was in the format of either a book, chapter, or conference paper as opposed to a journal article.

2. Articles in the Planning Development category in the period 2000–2016 mentioning the singular or plural of the following three terms in the topic: ‘complex emergency’ (N = 36); ‘humanitarian emergency’ (N = 26); and ‘protracted crisis’ (N = 6).

3. Out of all articles in the Economics category in the period 2000–2016 that contained the term ‘famine’ in the topic (N = 159), 44 focused on other issues than famine (27%). Out of all articles in the Planning Developmentcategory in the period 2000–2016 that contained the term ‘famine’ in the topic (N = 88), 12 focused on other issues than famine (14%).

4. The following random keywords exhibited a relative increase over time (1960–2016) in the articles’ topic: ‘democracy’, ‘economic growth’, ‘food’, ‘hunger’, ‘gender’, ‘infant mortality’, ‘disaster’, and ‘poverty’. This holds true for both Web of Science Social Science articles in general and for Planning Development articles.

5. See endnote 4.

6. As of 1 October 2017, searches for the entitlement approach encompassed the following search terms ‘entitlement approach’, ‘entitlement framework’, and ‘entitlement theory’. Double entries were deleted; as were articles with no reference to Amartya Sen.

7. Howe’s priority regimes approach, for example, has been referred to in just two Web of Science articles (Devereux, 2009; Howe, 2010) in the period 2000–2016 but has never been applied to a concrete case. Howe’s 2010 systems approach has also had a few references but none have used the approach to analyse specific famines.

8. I unsuccessfully applied for the Workshop ‘Explaining Famines, Defining Responsibilities’ that was held in 2017. Although the workshop had roots in the historical tradition, I thought the specified goal of discussing various environmental, social, economic, political, or cultural factors that affect the outbreak of famines and subsequent relief initiatives also conformed well with contemporary analyses. However, all the accepted papers were historical. The most recent case presentation was from the last century: the account of the 1944 famine in Holland.

9. Thanks to one of the anonymous referees at JDS for providing this insight.

10. The distribution is of course highly skewed with fewer than 5 per cent of the articles accounting for more than 40 per cent of the citations and with more than 50 per cent of the articles getting four citations or less. Contrary to what one might think, newer publications (barring those published just a year or two before the cut-off year of 2016) tend to have just as many citations as older publications mainly due to a general increasing trend in citations.

11. ‘Famine’ in title (N = 84), mean nine citations; ‘food’ in title (N = 534), mean 16 citations; ‘climate change’ in title (N = 226), mean 16 citations; ‘vulnerability’ in title (N = 190), mean 15 citations; and ‘disaster’ in title (N = 289), mean 15 citations. All other keywords were statistically different from ‘famine’ in the title on a 90 per cent level.

12. As a further indication of the limited career possibilities in famine research, a google search (2 November 2017) for ‘professor of famine’ resulted in no hits. As a comparison, ‘professor of disaster’ resulted in 355,000 hits; ‘professor of poverty’: 1,710.000 hits; ‘professor of earthquake’: 107,000 hits; ‘professor of flood’: 136,000 hits; and ‘professor of food security’: 320,000 hits.