Nadie habría esperado presenciar la magnitud e intensi-dad de la hambruna que estamos presenciando en Gaza. En la década de 1970, los nutricionistas pioneros en emergencias describieron la diferencia entre una crisis alimentaria aguda y una hambruna total como un cam-bio de estado, como cuando el agua helada se convier-te en hielo [1]. Se basaron en la experiencia de Biafra, Bangladesh y Etiopía, donde una combinación de pri-vación extrema de alimentos, colapso de los servicios esenciales y desplazamiento provocó que las tasas de mortalidad por desnutrición y enfermedades alcanzaran un punto crítico en el que aumentaron exponencialmente [2]. Hoy presenciamos esto en Gaza

Famine theory has overlooked the role of memory in constituting the social meaning of famine. This seminal collection of papers restores the cross-disciplinary study of famines, foregrounding social anthropology, history and comparative politics, in the question of how famines are understood by those in the afflicted societies, and how memories and meanings are shaped by social and political context. The collection plays an important role in focussing attention on transitional justice mechanisms for starvation crimes.

Iraq is a compelling example of a state highly dependent on a singular source of rent, namely oil revenue. Since 2003, Iraq has also been characterized by a fractured, rivalrous elite without central control over organized violence. This formula represents a “rentier political marketplace” in which state funds for salaries and contracts are the essential lubricant of the political system. During 2014–2021, successive shocks to national oil revenues represented a partial and temporary, but traumatic, decarbonization of Iraq’s government and political finance. In turn, this triggered a series of governance and political reconfigurations including a nominal decentralization process and fracturing of sectarian power, followed by a nationwide civic movement demanding transformational change. This paper traces these changes and the abrupt return to business as usual when oil prices rebounded. In doing so, the paper further investigates the nexus between oil and democracy in Iraq and addresses the unanswered question of how Iraq can decarbonize and democratize in the future.

The resurgence of famines is a topic of concern. This paper explains the recent trajectory using the framework of contending 'global war economies'. It characterises the unipolar neoliberal world order era (1986-2015) as the 'Pax Americana' war economy, focusing on the United States dollar's roles. These were the decades of the liberal imperium, the corporate food regime, and counterinsurgent coalitions, which generated structural vulnerability to food crises and reduced the actual incidence and lethality of famine. The paper characterises the subsequent period (2016 onwards) as the challenge of the BRICS club, focusing on its efforts to rewrite the global political economy's rules, proactively hedging among diversifying currency regimes. This entails a scramble to secure strategic commodities and infrastructure in subaltern countries, which is intensifying conflict and food insecurity, and revising international norms in favour of reasserting sovereign rights. The global political-economic contestation and, especially, the associated normative regression are permissive of political and military triggers of famine.

Decarbonization, or the replacement of fossil fuels by renewables or ‘cleaner’ forms of energy, is an essential response to global warming. A gap in the debate on decarbonization is its implications for fragile fossil fuel-producing states (FFFPs). Unable to implement strategies for planned decarbonization, FFFPs face the prospect of rapid, unmanaged ‘traumatic’ decarbonization. This paper examines the political economy of this phenomenon drawing on six countries that have experienced dramatic losses in carbon revenues in the recent past: Ecuador, Iraq, Nigeria, South Sudan, Sudan and Venezuela. It also draws on two thematic papers – on peace-making during oil shocks and a review of the literature on energy transition in fragile states. The paper finds that in decarbonizing FFFPs, the rules of the political game tend to be ‘sticky’ and elites react to the loss of oil revenues by looking for alternate sources of rent and turning to coercion. Political settlements including peace agreements are structured around the allocation of oil rents to elites and their future viability is in question. We find only modest evidence for sustainable and democratic paths away from a carbon-based political settlement, despite the efforts of civic movements.

From Antiquity through contemporary times, depriving populations of access to food, water and other means to sustain life has been a central tool of genocide. The deliberate withholding or destruction of objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population can be used to pursue policies that systematically target groups with an impact equal to, and potentially even more widespread than, acts of killing. However, the acts that produce and sustain starvation are treated as lesser crimes than killing. When described as famine, these calamities are often presented as natural or unintentional crises of hunger or low nutrition. Drawing on historical examples that range from ancient Carthage, colonial famines, the Nazi Hungerplan, Communist agricultural and political policies, manipulation of humanitarian aid during the war in Bosnia, and genocides in the 21st century, this chapter considers the complications of assessing intent and formulating responses to mass starvation. It offers a wide-ranging overview of the critical concepts, legal developments, and key issues at stake when deliberate deprivation is imposed on a people as part of genocidal policies.

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Abstract This chapter covers the first year of Abdalla Hamdok's tenure as prime minister of Sudan following the TMC-FFC accord. It explores the clash between his vision for a development and the “business as usual” political marketplace approach adopted by general Hemedti and the other prominent security actors. Burhan and Hemedti played an increasingly dominant role in both Sudan's internal peacemaking process and the efforts to repair relations abroad, through the process of normalizing ties with Israel and removal from the US list of designated State Sponsors of Terror. Meanwhile, Hamdok faced mounting crises due to disputes over subsidy reform accompanied by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

AbstractThis chapter documents the period between al-Bashir's ouster on 11 April and the signing of the Constitutional Declaration by representatives of the Forces of Freedom and Change and General Burhan's Transitional Military Council on 17 August 2019. It covers the tense negotiations between the FFC and TMC, assessing the development of Burhan and Hemedti's revolutionary strategy from April until the massacre of protestors gathered at the sit-in site in military headquarters on 3 June. The rupture in negotiations brought about by the massacre provoked an intervention by a variety of international actors, including the AU, UK, UN, IGAD and USA, eventually leading to the compromise of 17 August.

Genocide scholars have largely neglected Ethiopian histories of atrocious violence, with rare exceptions.1 This looks set to change given the violent conflict and spiralling human rights violations...

In 2017, the UN raised the alarm on famines in North-east Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen. Starvation has been used as a weapon of war in Syria, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo currently has among the largest numbers of severely food-insecure people of any country assessed by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) system. Each of these sites of mass starvation or famine can be understood as a ‘political marketplace’. They are characterised by the dominance of transactional politics over public institutions, and elite politics is conducted for factional or personal political advantage, on the basis of monetised patronage. This paper examines the relationship between these systems of transactional politics and famine and other forms of mass starvation, and outlines the implications of the political marketplace framework for humanitarian action. It argues that both transactional politics and mass starvation emerge from particular political-economic configurations characterised by economic precarity and mismanagement, violent forms of peripheral governance and war economies. Applying the political marketplace framework can help improve humanitarian information and early warning systems, as well as programme decision-making, while helping humanitarians think more carefully about the constant trade-offs they are forced to make.

In 2017, the UN raised the alarm on famines in North-east Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen. Starvation has been used as a weapon of war in Syria, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo currently has among the largest numbers of severely food-insecure people of any country assessed by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) system. Each of these sites of mass starvation or famine can be understood as a ‘political marketplace’. They are characterised by the dominance of transactional politics over public institutions, and elite politics is conducted for factional or personal political advantage, on the basis of monetised patronage. This paper examines the relationship between these systems of transactional politics and famine and other forms of mass starvation, and outlines the implications of the political marketplace framework for humanitarian action. It argues that both transactional politics and mass starvation emerge from particular political-economic configurations characterised by economic precarity and mismanagement, violent forms of peripheral governance and war economies. Applying the political marketplace framework can help improve humanitarian information and early warning systems, as well as programme decision-making, while helping humanitarians think more carefully about the constant trade-offs they are forced to make.

This paper examines the 1994 Declaration of Principles (DoP) for the resolution of the Sudanese civil war, adopted by the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD). This was the only occasion on which an African inter-state organization included separation as an option for resolving a civil war. It was the basis for South Sudan's independence in 2011. The DoP was drafted by the Ethiopian government, and imposed on belligerent parties, both of which were, at the time, unionist. The paper identifies two concepts of self-determination within the DoP— independence for colonial territories and the Marxist-Leninist idea of self-determination for national groups. The rationale for including both arose from Ethiopian leadership within IGAD. The paper also examines the diverse Sudanese debates on self-determination, including several strands of nationalism, Islamism, and the ‘New Sudan’ of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM). There was radical disagreement among Sudanese on national identity and self-determination, creating ambiguities that ironically facilitated the exercise in southern self-determination in 2011. Drawing on documentation of Sudanese negotiations, the paper examines how the DoP unlocked the Sudanese debate on the issue, and how the different concepts fared up to the time of the independence of South Sudan.

In political systems that we identify as ‘violent political marketplaces’, policy priorities for democracy activists and external actors include ending armed conflict, building governance institutions in a postconflict setting, reforming the security sector, and promoting democracy and/or justice. How can policymakers and activists formulate evidence-based theories of change to help guide them in the pursuit of these goals? This question is the focus of this memorandum.

This article is an introduction to a special issue that focusses on the relationship between the political marketplace, identity politics and organised violence. The political marketplace refers to an extreme form of neo-liberalism in which political relations are monetised. The introduction makes the argument that political marketplaces are associated with fragmented exclusive transnational identities that are constructed through contemporary violence, and with what we call disassembled states, often mediated by the international community. It is a contradictory and turbulent form of association. The articles in the collection provide evidence for various aspects of the argument.

This article forthcoming in the journal Nations and Nationalism frames a special collection on Nationalism and Self-determination in the Horn of Africa. It introduces the key concepts (the Horn of Africa, self-determination and nationalism), discusses the international law on self-determination and demonstrates how the praxis of self-determination in the Horn of Africa has contributed to normative developments. On the basis of five case studies (pertaining to Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia and Sudan/South Sudan) this framework article argues that nationalism and self-determination have had different meanings in the political cultures across the different countries of the Horn of Africa and across time. Rather than dismissing the concept of self-determination on account of its different meanings and understandings, we contend that such indeterminacy is unavoidable and should be welcomed. Nationalism is driven by historical circumstances that are contingent and often transitory. Self-determination claims based on such nationalism are equally contingent and transitory. When the principle of self-determination gets translated into concrete legal entitlements (for instance, a referendum on independence), it tends to solve one problem only by creating others. Instead, the pursuit and realization of self-determination require constant political processes. The papers in this collection highlight the challenges in giving effect to the principle of self-determination, including its subjugation to power politics. But they also show how the concept of self-determination does some important work in support of the emancipation of oppressed peoples: it provides a means to articulate the right to collective political agency. In this regard it is quite distinct, and more emancipatory, than other recent innovations in international norm-setting, such as the responsibility to protect (R2P), which depoliticize the specific situation and undermine the political agency of the suffering population.

ABSTRACT This paper frames Somalia’s modern history as a trajectory from aspiring high modernist nation-state formation to ‘disassembled’ state, examining how this has been accompanied by – and in part driven by – processes of identity formation and the penetration of marketised political relationships. The paper shows how armed conflicts and post-conflicts contributed to the emergence and consolidation of ‘clan units’ at the congruence of political-military entrepreneurship and emerging norms of public authority. It documents how failed wars and elite security politics (putchism and coup-proofing in both government and opposition) created the conditions for a parallel process of the monetisation of patronage, leading to the creation of a political marketplace in Somalia. The paper shows how peace processes and efforts to build social order from below contributed to a potential for consensus on the political ‘rules of the game’, but how this opportunity was squandered through the prioritisation of building a conventional state apparatus and the war on terror.