HCRI Landmark Lecture: Towards a New Global History of Famines

The Humanitarian & Conflict Response Institute (HCRI) will host Prof Alex de Waal to give our annual Landmark Lecture for 2025. This is a hybrid event and registration is essential.

FULL TITLE

Towards a New Global History of Famines: Challenges of Methods, Metrics, and Meanings  

ABSTRACT

Writing a global history of famine is as challenging as it is important. There is no plausible way of compiling a dataset that is at once fully comprehensive and rigorous. What counts as a famine, how it is recorded, and what data are available all vary hugely by time, place, and source. Extant histories are either chronicles of selected cases or use datasets limited by geography and time period. However, the exercise of compiling the best possible catalogue of famines reveals insights into how their scale, causes and characteristics have changed over time.

This lecture will focus on the last 150 years. It will explore key definitional issues, including how best to consider forced mass starvation and complex humanitarian emergencies. It will examine how different metrics and thresholds can point us towards different conclusions. It will confirm some high-level trends and patterns while discounting some common claims. The findings refine future research questions and sharpen policy challenges.

SPEAKER

Alex de Waal is executive director of the World Peace Foundation and Research Professor at the Fletcher School, Tufts University. He has worked on the Horn of Africa, and on famine, conflict, and related issues since the 1980s as a researcher and practitioner. He served as a senior advisor to the African Union on Sudan and South Sudan in various capacities. He was listed among Foreign Policy’s 100 most influential international intellectuals in 2008 and Atlantic’s 29 ‘brave thinkers’ in 2009. He is the recipient of the Huxley Award of the Royal Anthropological Institute for 2024.

De Waal’s recent books include: The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa: Money, war and the business of power (Polity 205); Mass Starvation: The history and future of famine (Polity 2018), New Pandemics, Old Politics: 200 years of the war on disease and its alternatives (Polity 2021), and (with Willow Berridge, Justin Lynch and Raga Makawi), Sudan’s Unfinished Democracy: The promise and betrayal of a people’s revolution (Hurst 2022). His next book is Negotiating the Sudans: The African Union High Level Panels 2009-2014, (with Willow Berridge, forthcoming Cornell University Press 2025).

ABOUT HCRI

Based at the University of Manchester, we are a leading global centre for the study of humanitarianism and conflict response, global health, international disaster management and peacebuilding.

Our work is driven by a desire to inform and support policy and decision makers, to optimise collaborations between partner organisations, and to foster increased understanding and debate within the field.

Bringing together disciplines from medicine to the humanities, we research questions and issues related to what the United Nations calls the ‘triple nexus’ – humanitarian response, development and peace. Our aim is to facilitate improvements in crisis response on a global scale.

https://www.hcri.manchester.ac.uk/

Host or Publisher Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute