Currently viewing the tag: "famine"
From the end of the Cold War until the mid 2,000’s, there had been a downward trend in the number of conflicts and conflict-related deaths. Alex de Waal’s concept of ‘famine crimes’ represents a singular and significant attempt to understand the reversal we are now seeing.[1] In drawing our attention to the procedural […]
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Starvation isn’t at the core of these malign political developments. But it’s clear that xenophobia, corruption and dishonesty are the enemies of humanitarian action and advocacy in the short term, and in the longer term they will impede sustained action to mitigate climate crisis and its traumas. The people who are deprived of what is indispensable for sustaining life, whether in Yemen or South Sudan, in refugee camps in Bangladesh or in detention facilities on the U.S.-Mexico border, are not only the victims of starvation crimes in need of our aid and advocacy, but are the wind chimes that warn of approaching storms.
Continue Reading →Mass starvation is a white-collar war crime. When there’s a man-made famine (the gendered language is deliberate–we have yet to witness a women-made one), there can be no excuse that the deprivation was perpetrated in the heat of the moment, or by rogue elements acting beyond orders. This is the case in Yemen today: four […]
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The WPF with Global Rights Compliance (GRC), partners in the project “Accountability for Starvation: Testing the Limits of the Law,” have published a series of memos documenting how existing international law might apply to starvation conditions, and why it should be applied to Syria and South Sudan. Today we publish our third […]
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In a new op-ed published by the Guardian (July 11, 2019), our colleagues in the Accountability for Starvation project, Mohammad Kanfash and Ali al-Jasem (both of Damaan Humanitarian Organization) argue why accountability for starvation crimes cannot go unaddressed.
Amid a war that may have cost 500,000 lives, we must hold the Syrian government […]
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WPF is proud to announce the publication of its latest occasional paper, “A Role for Social Nutrition in Strengthening Accountability for Mass Starvation?” by Susanne Jaspars (WPF Occasional Paper #20), June 24, 2019. An excerpt: “Notions of social nutrition have emerged at various points in time, and have been used or defined in different ways, often following crisis or famine. The concept has been applied to Western populations and to those in the Global South, in both emergency and more stable contexts to address malnutrition within its wider social, political and economic context. It has, however, been marginal com- pared to a biomedical or medicalised approach to nutrition, which focuses on nutritional requirements and treatment. In the second decade of the 2000s, however, the need to revive or re-invent some form of social nutrition is important because of the resurgence…”
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