Intellectual leadership for peace
Friday, May 4, 2018
9:00am – 5:30pm
Drawing on Tufts University’s distinguished record of scholarship and public engagement on the subject of famine, this conference will bring together faculty and researchers from across the University, in conversation with outside experts. Panels will address why famine has returned, today’s humanitarian challenges, legal and political issues related to criminalizing famine, and the most pressing famine of today, Yemen.
Mass Starvation upcoming book events for 2018
Read more
The future famine?
Read moreThis is the second half of a two part extended version of an essay published in the London Review of Books
Read moreThis is the first half of a two part extended version of an essay published in the London Review of Books
Read moreAlex de Waal has a new essay in the London Review of Books (39:12, 15 June 2017, pp. 9 – 12),
Read moreThere were many reasons for the under-recognized success in reducing famines: growing prosperity in Asia, the end of totalitarianism and wars of annihilation, and the control or elimination of killer diseases such as smallpox and typhus that killed millions of malnourished children. But credit also belongs to the international humanitarian response system. Twenty years ago I criticized the ”humanitarian international” for failing to deal with the political causes of mass starvation, but today it is clear that a professional and effective—and more politically aware—humanitarianism played its part in the near-conquest of famine.
Read moreIntroduction The Famine Trends dataset includes two kinds of overlapping events, which have hitherto largely been studied separately. One set
Read moreLast week’s declaration of famine in South Sudan was the first such declaration by the United Nations and associated agencies
Read moreUnder the Obama Administration, we have seen the humanitarian imperative compromised by counter-terror laws and the politics of alliances. In Somalia and Syria, aid agencies were hampered by the PATRIOT Act from operating in areas in which they might be deemed to be providing assistance, material or symbolic, to groups labeled as terrorists. Preventable humanitarian disasters followed. In Yemen, the U.S. has been party to economic warfare conducted by the Saudi Arabia-led coalition, causing famine conditions. In each of these cases, U.S. counter-humanitarianism cost lives, to no political benefit.
Read more