Memory and justice after famines: an introduction

Abstract

Famines in the Global South have claimed staggering numbers of lives, but are rarely the focus of scholarship on, or practices of, memorialisation and justice. The articles in this collection investigate how past famines have been dealt with – or silenced – in Cabo Verde, China, Brazil, East Timor/Timor-Leste, Ethiopia, India, Iran, Nigeria and Rwanda. This introductory essay first discusses why famines and hunger should be conceptualised as violence and mass atrocities, caused by human action. Thereafter, we outline some of the main insights that have emerged from the collection of articles. We show how and why mass starvation is often written out of official accounts of history, famine victims are rarely publicly commemorated and those responsible are not brought to justice. Yet the contributions also highlight that efforts to represent and commemorate famines, and to seek justice, take place in many – sometimes unexpected – spaces. The silence around historical famines may be broken in official justice processes or statements by powerholders, or through initiatives and practices ‘from below’, including in social media, songs and artistic work.

Keywords:

• Mass starvation
• memorialisation
• accountability
• violence
• silence

Introduction

Hunger deaths and suffering have multiplied in recent times. In 2023, the World Food Programme estimates that 345 million people experience acute food insecurity and that for at least 846,000 of them the conditions are catastrophic (WFP 2023, 6). Armed conflicts, including wars in Ukraine, Yemen, Ethiopia and Sudan, economic recession after the Covid-19 pandemic and extreme weather impact caused by climate change are among the main causes of this alarming development (FAO et al. 2022). Historically, hunger has killed staggering numbers of people. Between 1870 and 2010, large-scale famines claimed at least 100 million lives (de Waal 2018, 5). Notwithstanding their severity – and despite the fact that they are largely human-made – famines are rarely conceived of as mass atrocities that need to be acknowledged and memorialised and for which accountability and justice must be sought.

The last few decades have seen increased public attention to the past. Periods of mass violence especially have become objects of public commemoration and important building blocks in the construction of national identity (see Bell 2006; Macdonald 2013). This interest in the past is, however, very selective. As many as 258,000 people died during Somalia’s 2011 famine (Maxwell and Majid 2016, 55), but this generated far less global outrage and official memorialisation than, for example, considerably less deadly terrorist attacks in Europe and North America. Likewise, the global proliferation of transitional justice norms and practices to deal with past large-scale human rights violations has rarely been concerned with events of mass starvation. While mechanisms have been established to hold perpetrators accountable, uncover the truth about and commemorate victims of war, genocide and terrorism (Nagy 2008; Teitel 2014), famines continue to be perceived as ‘natural’ misfortunes and their victims remain mostly invisible and unaccounted. This despite the fact that a closer scrutiny of the causes of famines reveals that they are indeed often a result of deliberate human actions, policy decisions or failures to act, and it therefore makes sense to talk about and deal with them as ‘starvation crimes’ (Marcus 2003; Conley et al. 2022).

This collection takes its point of departure in the observation that grief and suffering caused by hunger is often treated differently than deaths inflicted by more direct and mediatised forms of violence. The slow hunger deaths of people in distant geographies have mattered little within scholarship and policy (see Rubin 2019). There are exceptions, though. The Great Irish Famine (1845–52) and the Ukrainian Holodomor (1932–33) have been extensively studied and memorialised (Kas’ianov 2011; Noack, Janssen, and Comerford 2012; Mark-Fitzgerald 2013). These are famines that occurred in Europe. Famines in the Global South are most often framed as outside of ‘violence’ and outside of what is ‘grievable’ (see Butler 2004).

The contributions to this volume investigate how past famines are understood and represented, how they are remembered, and how justice for them is sought – or not. Moving beyond the few European cases that have already received some scholarly attention, we focus on the aftermath of famines in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The articles look closely at memory, justice and silences after hunger crises in Cabo Verde, China, Brazil, East Timor/Timor-Leste, Ethiopia, India, Iran, Nigeria and Rwanda. The authors come from a range of academic disciplines – peace and development research, international relations, political science, history, anthropology, art and filmmaking – and have experience of living and/or carrying out extensive research in the societies they write about. This has enabled us to adopt an interdisciplinary approach and decolonial epistemes and methodologies, and to ground our findings in deep contextual knowledge. The articles build on and combine a wide range of sources. They draw on unique archival material and qualitative interviews; they analyse social media, lyrics of songs, proverbs, names and poetry and engage in collaborative artistic research. Together, they advance our understanding of how the legacy of famines is dealt with in legal and political processes, how people are affected by or inherit famine memories – and silences – and the many alternative spaces and ways in which memory can be preserved and justice sought after mass starvation.

The collection of articles in this volume not only contributes to scholarly debates on famines and their aftermath but is also relevant for policy and practice. How mass hunger is understood (as human-made violence or natural disasters), how it is remembered and whether those responsible are identified and held to account matter for both societies and survivors striving to cope with and move on after these great traumas. It also has implications for how we deal with famines in present times and those that may occur in the future.

This introductory essay discusses some of the main insights that emerge when studying the articles together. A reading of the whole collection confirms that historical mass starvation cases are often silenced, in both public and private settings, and helps us understand how and why. It also teaches us something about how memorialisation and the pursuit of justice actually take place, in various and sometimes unexpected spaces. Before discussing these findings in more depth, we turn our attention to why famines and hunger should be treated as violence and mass atrocities.

Famines and hunger as violence

Famines have often been understood as nature’s way to deal with excessive population growth (Malthus 1798; de Waal 2018, 36ff). Despite Sen (1983) showing that famines occur when there is entitlement failure and people are denied access to food, they continue to be associated with population growth amidst the scarcity of resources. Although many famines have occurred throughout history, after 1980 a decline in famine occurrences was noticed (de Waal 2018, 6). This decrease in famine deaths has been attributed to a number of factors including better health care, especially to treat epidemics and infectious diseases; reduction of income disparities; increased food production with technological intervention; and effective and better coordinated humanitarian responses during crises (de Waal 2018; Ó Gráda 2015). War and poor governance are main reasons for the rise of famines again in 2017, while extreme weather in the wake of climate change has further exacerbated the risk for hunger (see FAO et al. 2022).

This volume focuses on famines, defined as ‘a crisis of mass hunger that causes many people to die over a specific period of time’ (de Waal 2018, 17). The broader problem of chronic hunger is not a main focus but remains relevant to the discussion about what counts as violence and whose lives are grievable.

Galtung famously distinguishes between violence committed by an identifiable actor – direct violence – and violence where there is no such actor – structural violence (Galtung 1969, 170). His concept of structural violence has been highly important to enable the inclusion of injury, death and suffering by indirect or structural causes in the definition of violence. Despite this, however, dominant understandings of violence continue to consider it exceptional and to privilege the spectacular over the everyday (Das 2007). In media, policy strategies and scholarly debates, organised large-scale direct violence remains at the centre of attention, while the silent violence of hunger, poverty and disease receives far less consideration. Nixon (2011, 2) talks about ‘slow violence’ as ‘a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight’. With this, he too expands the understanding of what counts as violence, and challenges the focus on distinct events rather than long-term structures and processes in the conceptualisation and study of violence. Moreover, feminist scholars have underlined that the tendency to view violence as exceptional events can hinder us from seeing how it is played out in the everyday (Parashar 2023; Väyrynen et al. 2021). When it comes to famines, they are often conceived of as a byproduct of violence, rather than as a form of violence. Moreover, famines and hunger often occur in far-off geographies, and in inaccessible and invisibilised locations. While war and terrorism tend to produce sudden, spectacular and public deaths, famine casualties often happen in the private sphere, and its victims are often portrayed as feminised emaciated bodies devoid of agency (Kelleher 1997).

The fact that structural, or slow, violence has no immediate perpetrator has prevented and complicated efforts to identify the actors causing it and hold them accountable. Gupta (2012, 21) has described structural violence as a ‘crime without a criminal’. Tyner (2018), however, challenges the distinction between direct and structural violence by pointing out that a failure to act – for instance when governments refrain from preventing mass starvation – can be intentional. ‘Letting die’, he argues, can be an equally severe act as killing. Scholars and legal practitioners have advanced the idea of ‘starvation crimes’, referring to an ‘unlawful process of deprivation that occurs when actors impede the capacity of targeted persons to access the means to sustain life’ (Conley et al. 2022, 6). Prohibition against such crimes exists in international humanitarian, human rights and criminal law, as well as in the Rome Statute that governs the International Criminal Court. So far, these laws have rarely resulted in prosecutions, and as Conley et al. (2022, 2) note, ‘for purposes of attributing responsibility and pursuing accountability, starvation remains out of focus: widely inflicted but rarely considered sufficiently important to warrant special attention’. However, recent developments, including the adoption of United Nations Security Council Resolution 2417 condemning the starving of civilians as a tactic of war in 2018, suggest that this may be about to change.

Human-made famines in the Global South

The case studies of famines presented in this collection underscore the fact that famines are human-made¹ and a form of violence. Several of them occurred in a context of colonial rule. Colonial neglect and racist attitudes were behind the 1943 Bengal Famine in India, which killed an estimated three million people (Ranjan 2024), while in Cabo Verde one-fourth of the population died from hunger in the 1940s due to the restriction of movement and lack of response by the Portuguese rulers (Åkesson and Månsson 2024). In Iran during the First World War, millions died as the imperial powers waged war and confiscated food (Edalati and Imani 2024), while hunger killed 50,000 in Rwanda as its population was engaged in forced labour and had to contribute food to armies fighting in the Second World War (Mwambari 2024). As in contemporary zones of starvation, war was a key contributor to famine in the cases under study in this volume. The two World Wars had devastating effects on people’s ability to get enough food in various places around the world. A particularly clear case of war-induced starvation is Biafra, Nigeria, where the 1967–70 armed conflict involved a blockade and a deliberate policy of starvation of the Igbo population, which ended up killing around three million people, including many children (Nweke 2024). Likewise, armed conflict in Ethiopia contributed to the 1984–85 famine that killed half a million people (Tefera 2024). The Indonesian occupation and ensuing repression caused East Timor’s Great Famine of 1977–79; hunger in fact claimed more lives than any other phenomena during the occupation (Hearman 2024). China’s Great Leap Forward famine, which caused 30 million excess deaths in 1959–61, shows how disastrous development ambitions by authoritarian regimes can be behind massive starvation. The close link between famine and forced displacement is highlighted in the cases of Brazil, Ethiopia and East Timor. In Brazil and Ethiopia, droughts became devastating due to the poor treatment that the hunger victims received from the authorities (Lima 2024; Tefera 2024). Finally, some of the contributions also highlight the role of discrimination and inequalities in causing certain groups to starve. In Brazil, prejudices against the backland peasants enabled a policy that confined them to concentration camps where many met their death. In India, Dalits and other marginalised groups were particularly vulnerable when hunger struck (Lima 2024; Ranjan 2024).

Although the famines studied are clearly human-made, they are rarely portrayed or officially recognised as mass atrocities. In Cabo Verde, for instance, hunger is placed outside of violence and politics; instead, its causes tend to be located in the lack of rain, the infertility of the land and the archipelago’s vulnerable position in the Atlantic (Åkesson and Månsson 2024). In several cases we also see examples of how the hunger-affected are portrayed as helpless. While drawing attention to the effects of deliberate starvation, photos of starving individuals, including children, also risk presenting the starving society as ‘an infantile, inferior, and helpless zone of despair’ (Campbell quoted in Hearman 2024), thus depriving the victims of their agency. Rui’s article on China shows how Mao’s Great Leap Forward famine was portrayed as outside violence when the authorities blamed the weather in their communication with the urban population – but described as violence when they attempted to regain legitimacy in rural areas (Rui 2024). The discussions on social media about the Biafra famine in Nigeria counteracted the silencing of the starvation by portraying hunger as a weapon of war and the affected as hero-victims (Nweke 2024).

The famines studied in this collection occurred during different time periods: the 1910s in Iran, the 1920s and 1930s in Brazil, the 1940s in India and Rwanda, the 1950s and 1960s in China and Nigeria, and the 1970s and 1980s in East Timor and Ethiopia. This difference in timing is important, since it means that in some cases, survivors – as well as those bearing responsibility – may still be alive, while in others, famine memory is inherited by future generations. While specific historical famines are in focus for most articles, all societies under study also experienced hunger at other times – in the form of other large-scale famines or endemic hunger, in connection with natural hazards or more recently during Covid-19 lockdowns. As we will see, this may blur the lines between the memory of famines and that of other instances of suffering – and can serve to either overshadow or reactivate famine memory (see Edalati and Imani 2024; Mwambari 2024; Orjuela 2024; Ranjan 2024).

The articles in this collection focus on three dimensions of how famines are dealt with after their occurrence: representation (how they are talked about and whether they are understood as human-made violence or not), memorialisation and the pursuit of justice. We see these three aspects as interrelated: Whether and how hunger is understood and represented as violence will determine whether and how it is memorialised, while memorialisation can encourage efforts to identify perpetrators and hold them to account. Memorialisation and justice initiatives may in turn influence the understanding of famines as violence.

Each article contributes unique insights into an understudied topic – memory and justice after famines – in cases that have received only limited attention, if any. Together, they enable us to see some broader patterns regarding the silencing of famine histories, but also the spaces and initiatives that make it possible to talk about, remember and seek justice for hunger.

Silences and silencing

That famine atrocities are often ignored in memory and justice process is a starting point for this volume. The different contributions teach us more about how this silencing happens in different contexts.

Many of the cases show how power constellations in the famine-struck society work to suppress famine memory. Powerholders can have an interest in silencing difficult pasts, including famines. In East Timor, both Indonesia and its Western allies were keen to conceal the starvation crisis as it happened. After independence in 1999, for the newly established state of Timor-Leste, stability and friendly relations with Indonesia, the powerful neighbour that had contributed to the many deaths, were more important that finding the truth about, seeking justice for and remembering the victims of the famine (Hearman 2024). In Ethiopia, the transitional justice process that came about after the 1991 regime change was an example of victor’s justice. As Tefera (2024) shows, neither the new powerholders nor international actors pushed for justice for starvation crimes, partly because they too had played a part in causing the hunger crisis when using humanitarian aid for political purposes. Post-war Nigeria embarked on a deliberate policy of suppressing the memory of Biafra’s struggle for secession. Official commemorative efforts focused on the military victory, emphasised national unity and celebrated soldiers who had fought on the government side, while ignoring the victims and fighters on the Biafra side (Nweke 2024). In China, to safeguard its legitimacy, the central government was eager to divert attention from the role Mao had played in causing the devastating Great Leap Forward famine (Rui 2024). In Iran before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the links between the monarchy and Britain dissuaded official recognition and commemoration of the Great Famine (Edalati and Imani 2024). Cabo Verde’s complicated relation to the Portuguese colonialists likewise led to a reluctance to talk about their role in the hunger crises that had affected the island state (Åkesson and Månsson 2024).

Several contributions show how attempts to portray the country in question as modern and successful have discouraged public debate, justice-seeking and commemoration of famines. Rwanda, for instance, has been eager to convey an image of itself as an African success story. Consequently, negative news about hunger has been kept back, and the Umuganura harvest festival has been celebrated even during the severe food shortage of the 2020–2022 pandemic (Mwambari 2024). In Iran, modernisation and Westernisation dominated the story about the country before the Islamic Revolution. The Islamic Republic also largely refrained from evoking the memory of famine and strived to build an image of itself as a strong country (Edalati and Imani 2024). Cabo Verde too has portrayed itself as a successful, developed country where hunger ceased to exist after independence. Consequently, hunger-related problems have been silenced by a state that wants to avoid admitting failure, maintain its legitimacy and appear modern and sovereign (Åkesson and Månsson 2024; see also Orjuela 2024).

In some contexts, experiences of famine have been overshadowed by other atrocities that – unlike the hunger deaths – have been politicised and publicly commemorated or sought justice for (Orjuela 2024). Rwanda is a case in point. There, the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi has dominated official memory- and justice-making (Mwambari 2024). In Iran, other key historical events, such as the Iran–Iraq war, have gained vast public recognition while the Great Persian Famine remains in the margins of history (Edalati and Imani 2024).

Edalati and Imani’s article on Iran (2024) also draws attention to the role of survivors and their descendants in the silencing of famine memory. It is, they note, painful for people to remember and they thus suppress their memory in many ways. This, together with the lack of official recognition in, for instance, school textbooks and public discourse, contributes to the silencing of the devastating First World War famine. The articles by Lima and Ranjan, importantly, show how the silencing of famine experiences is also shaped by subalternity, marginalisation and racism. In Brazil, the elite does not have an interest in uncovering the history of oppression of the backland peasants, including their treatment during the droughts in the 1920s and 1930s (Lima 2024). One of Ranjan’s collaborators asked: ‘How would you capture the Dalit experiences of the famine … I don’t think you will find any Dalit person who is that old … Dalits don’t live that long …’ (Ranjan 2024). This points to short life expectancy as one of many injustices underprivileged groups face and that also affects memory-making.

Moreover, the problem of finding evidence and the lack of physical traces of famines may contribute to their silencing. This is evident from the transitional justice process in Ethiopia, where not only a lack of resources to investigate the many crimes of the Dergue regime, but also the difficulty to present evidence, hampered prosecution of starvation crimes (Tefera 2024). In Timor-Leste, Hearman (2024) notes how traces of famine-related heritage sites were erased by road construction. Also, elsewhere, mass starvation has left no or few physical remains (see also Corporaal and de Zwarte 2022). In her conceptual article, Orjuela discusses how the nature of famine violence itself can impede its memorialisation: the blurred lines between victims and victimisers, and the lack of heroes and clear start and end dates can make it difficult to package a famine as a tragedy worthy of attention and commemoration (Orjuela 2024).

Breaking the silence

Although it is clear that famines are often invisibilised, this is not the whole story. In fact, famine memory remains alive among survivors and their descendants, and through a broad range of initiatives. This section looks into the various actors who serve as ‘memory entrepreneurs’ (Conway 2010, 446) or ‘drivers of justice’ (Skaar and Wiebelhaus-Brahm 2013), and the spaces in which the silences that surround starvation crimes and their memory are broken.

China is often understood as a case where the legacy of massive famines has been repressed and silenced by the authorities. Rui’s contribution challenges this perception. In her detailed narrative from Nayang Prefecture, Henan Province, she shows that the peasants were well aware of the central government’s responsibility for the massive number of hunger deaths in the Great Leap Forward famine. In response, and to safeguard its legitimacy, the government initiated the rural rectification movement in the 1960s to publicly identify and punish local cadres for their role in causing hunger (Rui 2024). This justice process did not primarily serve the interests of famine victims, but – like many other attempts at seeking justice after mass atrocities – primarily helped legitimise national powerholders (see Mihr 2020). While the taboo surrounding the famine has gradually been lifted in China, the process of averting blame from the central to the local level also set new limitations for how it was possible to talk about starvation crimes. In Timor-Leste, the end of Indonesian rule in 1999 paved the way for a transitional justice process that involved a truth commission and public hearings. A national centre for memory was established, enabling exhibitions, research, publications and plans for a monument (Hearman 2024). The Red Terror Trials in Ethiopia, a justice process that became possible after the 1991 regime change, did look into forced displacement and starvation, even though it in the end did not file any starvation crime case (Tefera 2024).

The article on Iran shows how the famine past may be evoked in political rhetoric. President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad brought up the issue of compensation for Britain’s role in starving Iran’s population during the First World War in connection with an international dispute about the Holocaust in 2009 (Edalati and Imani 2024). In her article, Orjuela (2024) analyses the two famines that have been the object of extensive public commemoration – the Great Irish Famine (1845–52) and the Ukrainian Holodomor (1932–33) – and teases out what made a breaking of the silence possible. A disruption or change from the past – leaving hunger behind in Ireland and independence in the case of Ukraine – is important, as is the interest of political leaders to use a traumatic past for nation-building purposes or in oppositional politics.

So far, we have discussed official or top-down initiatives. The articles also provide an abundance of examples of how activism and initiatives from below make space for memory and justice after famines. In Brazil, the group Equipe Cultural 19–22 carried out research, raised public awareness and used legislation and formal processes for heritage-recognition to push for public acknowledgement and preservation of the memory of the Patu concentration camp where famine-affected people had been held under dismal conditions. Lima’s article also highlights the role of religious leaders, who established the ‘Walk of the Drought’ that has attracted pilgrims and others to honour the memory of the famine victims of the camp (Lima 2024). In the case of Iran, the exhibition of the works by famous miniature-painter Hossein Behzad in 2014 shows that art depicting the suffering of hunger can occasionally be publicly displayed, even when famine history is otherwise silenced (Edalati and Imani 2024).

Orjuela (2024) too highlights the role of local enthusiasts, historians and artists in bringing about famine memorialisation ‘from below’, while Mwambari (2024) shows how a young generation of YouTubers have revived the memory of the 1943 Ruzagayura famine. He draws on the concept of vernacular memory to trace the many ways in which famine memory lives on in poetry, names and proverbs. He also demonstrates how present events – hunger during the Covid-19 lockdown – can play an important role in activating and recovering the memory of past famines (see Knight 2012). In Cabo Verde, the prevailing silence around experiences of hunger is broken through music. Åkesson and Månsson (2024) analyse the lyrics of traditional mornas and argue that they make up a space for ‘organic remembering’ – the songs are not intended for the memorialisation of hunger but nevertheless transmit memories between generations, thereby ‘reactivating a collection of historical experiences’. Another space where official silences about famine pasts are challenged is social media. In his piece, Nweke shows how memories of the blockade and the ensuing famine in Biafra are brought to life on Twitter, often by a younger generation who did not themselves experience it. Here – as well as in the East Timorese case – photographs from the famine draw attention to the sufferings of the past (Nweke 2024; Hearman 2024).

Ranjan (2024), in his contribution, focuses on the potential of both old oral traditions and more recent collaborative filmmaking techniques in reviving and co-creating famine memories with subaltern groups. In dialogue with Dalit villagers, he and the artists he collaborates with make use of the Patchitra tradition of storytelling through scrolls and songs. Experiences of hunger and exclusion are captured in scroll paintings and lyrics, but also discussed with the villagers. The filming of the process adds another layer of narration and is in itself a way to break the silence around hunger. Finally, in Timor-Leste, the recovery and reburial of bodies of famine victims is an example of justice and memory work that takes place outside the areas regulated by the state, in family, clan and village groups (Hearman 2024).

Clearly, the silence around famines is not absolute or permanent. The memory lives on in many ways, through both private and public initiatives. It is also evident from the various contributions that famine memory and the pursuit of justice – and the struggle over who gets to define the past – are closely entwined with larger political projects or societal debates related to nation-building, internal and international conflict and/or the revisiting of a colonial past. Indeed, in many of the societies under study in this volume, famine memory and justice are connected to processes of decolonisation and the redefinition of relations to former colonial or otherwise dominant powers (see Basu 2017). At the same time, post-famine memory and justice is deeply personal to survivors as well as to the generations that inherit the memories – and silences – of large-scale hunger.

Concluding remarks

Efforts to represent and commemorate famines, and to seek justice, take place in many – sometimes unexpected – spaces. To argue that famines are mass atrocities that tend to be forgotten – especially when they occur in the Global South – helps us draw attention to the ways in which certain sufferings are marginalised, and how postcolonial power relations determine which types of violence are made visible and grievable. However, we also need to recognise that famine experiences are not unnoticed by everyone and everywhere. In fact, hunger crises are remembered and (re)presented through practices and initiatives by artists, activists, ordinary people and sometimes also powerholders.

Our findings, we argue, can be used to theorise representation, justice and memorialisation as interlinked processes. These processes may contribute to a silencing of famines by placing them outside violence and representing them as natural hazards and their victims as helpless ‘others’. They may avoid identifying and holding perpetrators to account and suppress or neglect famine memory. As we have seen, such negative silencing spirals are driven by many actors: government representatives, international organisations, media and survivors themselves. At the same time, we note that efforts to draw attention to famine violence – through, for instance, social media utterances, songs, artistic work or heritage recognition processes – can potentially (but not necessarily) challenge the picture of famines as tragedies that do not require justice and memorialisation. Transitional justice processes have the potential to bring at least partial justice for famine victims, while at the same time paving the way for an understanding of hunger as a form of violence. Talking about famines as violence caused by both structures and actions will, in turn, enable both memorialisation and the pursuit of justice, while memorialisation can bring questions of accountability into focus.

Another theoretical contribution of the collection is to the understanding of violence. As discussed above, violence is typically perceived as a disruption of normality. Public discourse and media coverage are full of images of warring, dead, injured and grieving bodies, wrecked landscapes and homeless people on the move. We question this exceptionality around violence and, through a discussion on famines, bring to the fore ‘slow’, unaesthetic deaths that are hidden from public view or deployed in particular ways to invoke empathy and charity, but where the victims are not recognised as deserving of accountability and justice. Such violence is not a rupture of the ordinary but deeply embedded in intimate everyday activities, such as the consumption of food – a basic right that is denied to people for a number of reasons. We have identified four main reasons why famines and hunger are treated as outside the sphere of violence, or as byproducts of violence. First, critical approaches to violence have increasingly focused on discursive erasures and silences, thereby avoiding specific reference to the human subjects and their experiences. Second, violence is treated as an exceptional and mediatised spectacle, outside of everyday politics, thereby ignoring structures within society and polity that breed and perpetuate less spectacular kinds of violence, like domestic violence and hunger. Third, famine is treated as a feminised atrocity, where images of victims and survivors, of emaciated bodies and shrinking human forms, of women and children on display, do not attract media attention and scrutiny except to invoke public empathy. In addition, famine violence is depicted as occurring within the household and hence hidden from public gaze. Finally, many famines take place in inaccessible or invisible geographies, mostly in the Global South, that are not ‘strategic’ spaces for possible interventions. Our critical discussion of what is outside and inside the purview of ‘violence’ – and why – is intended to expand and problematise the notion of violence, theoretically but also with implications for practical action.

With this collection we hope to provide both new knowledge and refreshing discussions about an urgent and timely topic of global relevance. This too, as de Waal (2024) points out in his epilogue, is a way to break the silence about famines, and the memorialisation and pursuit of justice in their aftermath. Through this collection of articles, we hope to have started a conversation that others will continue into the future.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swedish Research Council under Grant 2018-03770.

Notes on contributors

Camilla Orjuela

Camilla Orjuela is a professor of peace and development research at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her research has focused on diaspora mobilisation, peace activism, identity politics, post-war reconstruction and reconciliation, famines, memory conflicts and transitional justice.

Swati Parashar

Swati Parashar is a professor of peace and development research at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her research interests include critical security and war studies, feminist and postcolonial international relations, women militants and combatants, as well as gender, violence and development in South Asia.

Notes

1 While we use the term ‘human-made’, it is not inaccurate to say that most famines are in fact ‘man-made’.