Paper details

Paper authors	Alex de Waal
In panel on	Criminalizing Starvation
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting	In-Person / Online

Abstract

This paper locates the project of criminalizing starvation in the context of famines and humanitarian action. It proposes three overlapping concepts: famine, denial of humanitarian assistance, and starvation crimes, and explores distinctions among them, complementarities and tensions. Thus, there are famines caused primarily by political or economic misconduct, in which criminal liability is not evident; there are cases of obstruction of humanitarian assistance in which there is no obvious criminality, there are starvation crimes (e.g. in the case of penal starvation) that do not cause famine, etc. The paper also explores the role of criminalizing starvation, including prosecution, in the wider strategic goal of shifting public opinion towards intolerance of famine.

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