Hunger as a Weapon of War and Genocide

80 years ago this winter, an estimated 20,000 people in the west of the Netherlands died as a result of a Nazi blockade on food and fuel. The “Hunger Winter” is one episode in a war in which 20 million people died of hunger. The use of starvation was so pervasive that Raphael Lemkin – who coined the term ‘genocide’ – identified starvation as one of genocide’s principal tools, yet it took until 1998 to criminalise it.  

Today, the use of starvation as a weapon of war and genocide is rising, and around 223 million people are being starved as deliberate policy. For the past, the present, and the future, this raises several questions. How does hunger interact with processes of mass violence, such as enforced population movement and genocide? How does starvation intersect with cultural, legal, and ethical frameworks, including the right to food, food sovereignty, and the crime of starvation in international law? And what are the societal impacts of food insecurity and hunger as a localized experience, as well as its longer term, intergenerational effects? 

This programme is organized in collaboration with the Amsterdam Centre for Middle Eastern Studies, Meertens Institute Ethnology Department and NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. The artwork is made by Leah Downing. 

About the panel 

Muna Haddad is a Palestinian human rights lawyer. She is a PhD candidate in the School of Law at Queen Mary University of London, writing her dissertation titled “Posthumous Existence and the Law: The (Il)legality of Withholding Dead Bodies by States – The Case of Israel”. With Prof. Neve Gordon, she co-authored The New York Review article “The Road to Famine in Gaza” (2024).

L.H. Lumey is professor of epidemiology at Columbia University Medical Center. He is known for his groundbreaking work the long term and intergenerational effects of exposure to famine and the epigenetic pathways through which this takes place. Lumey’s studies have included the Ukraine famine of 1932-33, the Dutch famine of 1944-45, and the Chinese famine of 1959-61.

Naomi Pendle is an anthropologist and lecturer at the University of Bath, where she studies governance during armed conflict and famine. She specialises in South Sudan and has carried out research there since 2010. She is currently broadening her scope and is working on a wider socio-legal study of famine and its use. Her book Spiritual Contestations – The Violence of Peace in South Sudan was published by James Curry (2023).

Alex de Waal is the Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation. Considered one of the foremost experts on Sudan and the Horn of Africa, his scholarly work and practice has also probed humanitarian crisis and response, human rights, governance in Africa, and conflict and peace-building. His latest book is Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine (Polity Press 2017). His recent article in the London Review of Books reflects on famine measurement and the classification of catastrophe in Gaza.

Ingrid de Zwarte is a lecturer in Economic and Environmental History at Wageningen, where she focuses on the role of food and famine in wartime: from hunger as a political-military instrument of power to social self-organization in times of hunger, from the demographic consequences of famine to the influence of hunger on migration and identity formation. Her most recent book The Hunger Winter is published by Cambridge University Press (2020). Together with Jeroen Candel, de Zwarte edited the book Ten Billion Mouths: How We Will Feed the World in 2050 (2020). 

About the moderators 

Ayşenur Korkmaz is a post-doctoral researcher at the Meertens Institute, working as a part of the ERC-funded MakeBelief project. Her research interests are at the nexus between mass violence, heritage, and genealogy in the post-genocide landscapes of Turkey and Armenia.

Solange Fontana is a researcher at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies, where she studies the relationship between social networks, resilience, civilian protective agency, and conflict recurrence in eastern D.R. Congo. Since 2001, Solange has worked at the intersection of emergency food security and protection in both Africa and the Middle East.

Rebeca Ibáñez Martín is an anthropologist at the Meertens Institute and the University of Amsterdam with expertise in critical food studies, environmental anthropology, and social studies of science (STS). Rebeca conducts ethnographic fieldwork in industrial agricultural settings across the Netherlands and Spain, bringing together the intersections of landscape exploitation, environmental toxicity, digitalization, mobility patterns, and labor practices among both human and non-human actors.