![]() ![]() The idea behind the project was to create a dataset recording two overlapping events: the first was the incidence of ‘great famines’ since 1870, that is famines which caused more than 100,000 excess deaths (Devereux 2000), and the second, drawing on work by David Marcus (2003), was to record the incidence of armed conflict during these famines and the use of deliberate mass starvation in these conflicts. International criminal prosecutors have concerned themselves with direct violence-murder, torture, and rape-avoiding the question of culpability for starvation.” (de Waal 2015) Scholars of mass atrocity focus on violent killing, and have not analysed mass death from the perspective of starvation and disease. Specialists in food and agriculture tend not to analyse war and genocide. “Too often, famines and mass atrocities that involve forced starvation have been studied separately. ![]() ![]() The World Peace Foundation’s research project on famine trends had emerged from a simple contradiction in prior famine research: I learned this the hard way, when researching the Chinese famine of 1876-1879. ![]() This is, of course, self-evident, but it is a trap that is surprisingly difficult to evade. As a researcher, it is easier to replicate the work of scholars who have already worked on a subject, than to come up with original research. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |