The efforts by the American Mennonite Relief organization to provide famine relief to Russia in the early 1920s are relatively well known. Far less known are the actions of Dutch Mennonite relief efforts at the same time, which were intended to strengthen the ties between Dutch and Ukrainian

Famine’s sensational headline potential can get in the way of thinking about the more general issues of malnutrition and food insecurity. Recent research on famine sees it as the extension of structural, long-term vulnerabilities in society rather than as the result of unpredictable ‘acts of God’.

Marching Through Suffering is a deeply personal portrait of the ravages of famine and totalitarian politics in modern North Korea since the 1990s. Featuring interviews with more than thirty North Koreans who defected to Seoul and Tokyo, the book explores the subjective experience of the nation's famine and its citizens' social and psychological strategies for coping with the regime. These oral testimonies show how ordinary North Koreans, from farmers and soldiers to students and diplomats, framed the mounting struggles and deaths surrounding them as the famine progressed. Following the development of the disaster, North Koreans deployed complex discursive strategies to rationalize the horror and hardship in their lives, practices that maintained citizens' loyalty to the regime during the famine and continue to sustain its rule today. Casting North Koreans as a diverse people with a vast capacity for adaptation rather than as a monolithic entity passively enduring oppression, Marching Through Suffering positions personal history as key to the interpretation of political violence.

This paper examines the history and future of food security through the implementation of 'bio-technology'. The historical lens focuses on the increased use of the potato, and the devastating consequences of monoculture during the Irish Potato Famine. The paper concludes with a brief examination of the future of food technology in lab-grown meats.

Coffee plays in important role in the minds of Contemporary Swedes. It is ineed what nutritional anthropologists call a cultural superfood. For the past Three centuries, Swedish authorities have considered in their right and duty to interfere with the food habits of the nation's inhabitants. They have tried to regulate what people eat, how they eat, what quantities hey eat, and in what combination. Coffee has been no exception

This article centers on the German perception of the Great Soviet Famines of 1931–1933, with a focus on Soviet Ukraine in particular. The first part explores the channels through which information from the Soviet Union detailing the Famine reached the Germans and the attempts by different Reich institutions to control the spread of knowledge in German society about this human tragedy. Against this framework the article details the policy enacted by different organizations to provide relief to the starving Germans, both ethnic Germans and German citizens, who were living in the USSR. In the second part, the article deals with the patterns of perception that shaped the German view of the Famine. The author thus provides invaluable insight into the Reich’s policy towards Soviet Ukraine, and more broadly into the perception of the Famine among well-informed Germans of the 1930s.

This article provides a general chronology of Italian famines, incorporating earlier chronologies as well as recent research on preindustrial mortality crises and covering the whole period from circa 1250 to 1810. Hypotheses about the occurrence of famines are tested using the largest-existing database of time series of burials, covering northern Italy and part of central Italy, as well as a database of time series of wheat prices covering the whole of the Peninsula. The role played by food provisioning institutions is briefly detailed and a summary discussion of the causative factors of famines is provided. We argue that the majority of the most severe medieval and early modern famines happen when a situation of high demographic pressure on the available resources couples with periods of meteorological instability of the kind unfavorable to wheat crops, and the crisis is so widespread that institutions are unable to provide effective remedies.

The deep structural and cultural changes taking place in North Korea provide an opportunity to conduct influence operations to shape that country’s culture and society, either to destabilize the government or to prepare the population for a regime change. This paper presents a conceptual model of how contradictions between top down, imposed culture and organic, indigenous culture can be exploited to destabilize the system, and eventually repattern the culture. The process includes the following steps: identification of the cultural type; understanding relevant cultural forms; identification of vulnerable targets; evaluation of the information system; identification of effective elements of persuasion; mapping of the architecture of social control; and introduction of new “attractors” to damage or destroy the constituent cultural myths.

This paper sets out to understand the Monga vulnerability in Rangpur region of northwest Bangladesh from the perspective
of affected households. The local term ‘Monga’ means a famine-like situation and it has caught public interest recently.
Based on empirical evidence from five villages in the Rangpur region using different qualitative methods, the findings
highlight that the Monga predisposes the households to multi-sphere experiences of hunger and poverty. It is not just one
consequence of income poverty; rather, the social and livelihood mechanisms of poor households are dysfunctional,
multiply rooted in their entitlements, capabilities, their ways of living, and the negotiations they have with the complex
network of institutions that affect households both singly and synergistically.

This is a much longer version of the review I wrote for Central Eurasian Reader. I post it online for two reasons: first, because I think this is an important book that deserves to be known beyond the small circle of those who read Italian; second, because in my review for Central Eurasian Reader I misunderstood a passage (p. 486 top). The author pointed this out, and this is my way to do a thorough samokritika. My doubts on that specific paragraph, though, remain. The amended part is highlighted in yellow.

«Tened presente el hambre: recordad su pasado»,
vaticinaba el poeta Miguel Hernández poco antes de
terminar la guerra civil. Era una premonición que se
adelantaba a lo que sucedería tras el fin de la guerra.
Entre 1939 y 1951, España se vio sumida en un periodo
de escasez y miseria sin precedentes. Días de muertes por
inanición, enfermedades, cartillas de racionamiento,
estraperlo o pan negro. El régimen franquista culpó de
aquellos años recios a los desastres de la guerra, al
aislamiento internacional y a la «pertinaz sequía»,
eludiendo cualquier responsabilidad. Aquel tiempo,
grabado en la memoria popular como «los años del
hambre», fue mucho más que eso. El libro indaga en la
historia del hambre de nuestra posguerra, identificando lo
sucedido en aquellos tiempos como una auténtica
hambruna homologable a las que hubo entonces en
Europa. Mira a su origen, sus formas, sus contextos, sus
resistencias, a su utilización por parte del franquismo, a
sus dramáticas consecuencias y también a su memoria.
Como nos pedía el poeta, se rescatan del olvido aquellos
años extremos, valorando la responsabilidad de la
dictadura de Franco y acabando con el manto de silencio
que lanzó sobre el sufrimiento de muchos españoles.

Peter Singer argues that we’re obligated to donate our entire expendable income to aid organizations. One premiss of his argument is "If it is in your power to prevent something bad from happening, without sacrificing anything nearly as important, it is wrong not to do so." Singer defends this by noting that commonsense morality requires us to save a child we find drowning in a shallow pond. I argue that Singer’s Drowning Child thought experiment doesn’t justify this premiss. I offer my own Drowning Children thought experiment, which should reveal that commonsense morality entails that premiss two is actually false.

How does North Korea become visible and legible to us? What seems like propaganda and what seems like the real North Korea, and why? After more than 70 years of hostility it is an understatement to say that disrespect is deeply entrenched on both sides of the DMZ. Nonetheless, since the end of the Cold War in Europe and the cultural turn in Cold War Studies, scholarship on North Korea has become much more interesting. The monographs and articles examined here shed light on North Korea, but also speak to broader questions about human rights and hegemonic politics, visuality and capitalism, revolution and modernity, work and ideology, and the ethical framework for ending civil wars. In what is referred to here as critical scholarship on North Korea, we catch a glimpse of divergent post-Cold War currents and logic, with some shared commitment to look back, and to look again, from a position of proximity.

The fact that the front line crossed Moldova and the bloody battles that happened in the region devastated the social balance, economic relations, as well as the ethnic and professional composition of the population and destroyed the urban infrastructure. The drought that hit the region after the last military hostilities and the famine that followed, accentuated at the same time by the Red Army’s abuses, formed the particularities of Moldova’s situation on the background of post-war Romania. Next, the spring 1944 evacuation created a power vacuum and disturbed the economic and social region’s life. As a result, the Groza government together with its communist ministers started an aggressive campaign against the speculators, the effects of the supplies given to the population being just hypothetical. After consulting the local archives, the press from that time and the memoirs we tried throughout this study to capture the socio-economical realities of the first years after the II World War in the northern Moldova and the way authorities managed this crisis.

Le Cap-Vert est un ensemble de dix petites îles volcaniques, montagneuses pour la plupart, situées dans l’Atlantique ; sans
ressources naturelles, au climat sahélien caractérisé par la faiblesse et l’irrégularité des précipitations, les conditions naturelles y sont
hostiles à l’implantation humaine. Lors de leur découverte, les îles étaient désertes et la végétation limitée à environ 300 espèces. Au
début du XVe siècle, les îles, escales obligées sur les routes des Amériques, de la côte africaine et de l’Asie, jouent le rôle d’entrepôt
pour le trafic d’esclaves et de point d’acclimatation des plantes américaines avant leur diffusion en Afrique et vice-versa. Le
développement de l’agriculture (surtout le maïs pluvial et les haricots) entraîne la disparition d’une grande partie de la végétation
naturelle et la dégradation du milieu. Les famines lors des sécheresses déciment de plus en plus souvent la population, forçant de
nombreux habitants à émigrer et les ressources hydriques diminuent. Après l’indépendance, sont réalisés d’importants travaux de
reforestation et de lutte antiérosive afin de protéger les aquifères, plusieurs barrages sont construits et des méthodes d’agriculture
économe en eau se développent ; la consommation humaine repose de plus en plus sur l’eau dessalinisée ; l’agriculture irriguée
connaît une forte croissance alors que le maïs recule et que le développement du tourisme entraîne un intérêt accru pour la
protection du milieu.

Flavius Josephus, Hieronymus und die Eroberung Roms 410 n. Chr. Summary: When Jerome was made to leave Rome in 385 CE he apostrophised the city as a new Babylon. This paper argues that he did not make use of such apocalyptic language merely in the heat of the moment. Twenty five years later, when the city was taken by Alaricʼs troops in 410 CE, Jerome had once more the opportunity to write about Rome in a number of his texts. This time, however, he chose Josephusʼ description of the siege and sack of Jerusalem as his model. These texts illustrate the masterful command of the complex intertextual web of Biblical and classical allusions that Jerome was able to decipher and use for his own literary goals. In this way Jerome aligned the fall of Rome with the theological interpretation of the destruction of Jerusalem as divine retribution for the transgressions of its citizens and thus marked the city that would remain for him a place of damnation. Zusammenfassung: Sein Fortgang aus Rom 385 n. Chr. veranlasste Hieronymus dazu, die Stadt Rom als neues Babylon zu stilisieren. Dass er solch eine apokalyptische Bildsprache keineswegs nur im Affekt wählte, möchte dieser Beitrag zeigen. Fünfundzwanzig Jahre später bot die Einnahme Roms durch Alarichs Truppen 410 n. Chr. Hieronymus die Möglichkeit, erneut und an verschiedenen Stellen über Rom zu schreiben: Diesmal nutzte er aber die Darstellung des Flavius Josephus über den Untergang Jerusalems als Vorlage, deren vielfältige intertextuelle biblische und klassische Bezüge der Kirchenvater meisterhaft zu analysieren wusste. Den Fall Roms stellte Hieronymus so in eine Reihe mit der theologischen Deutung der Zerstörung Jerusalems, die als göttliche Strafe für die Verfehlungen der Einwohner erfolgte, ebenso wie Rom für Hieronymus zeitlebens eine verfluchte Stadt bleiben sollte. . Ammianus Marcellinus hielt sich wohl zeitgleich mit Hieronymus in Rom auf, vgl. Matthews (1989) 8-10. Ein Brief der Collectio Avellana bezeichnet Papst Damasus als "Matronen-Ohrlöffel" (matronarum auriscalpius) vgl. Coll. Av. 1,9, dazu Fontaine (1988) 177-192 sowie Rebenich (1992) 160 mit Anm. 105, der im Ohrlöffelchen eher eine Anspielung auf das Redetalent des Damasus denn eine sexuelle Konnotation sehen will; vgl. zu den Mechanismen von Damasusʼ Bemühungen um aristokratische Damen auch Brown (2012) 250-254. Bedeutsam ist in diesem Kontext ein kaiserliches Reskript vom 30. Juli 370 an Damasus, welches priesterliche Erbschleicherei bei den Matronen Roms unter dem Vorwand der Frömmigkeit einschränken solle, vgl. CTh 16,2,20: Durch Schenkungen oder testamentarische Verfügungen dem Klerus zufallendes Vermögen aus der Hand von Matronen, die mit den begünstigten Klerikern nicht verwandt waren, solle dem Fiskus zufallen, die Bestimmung hingegen in allen Kirchen der Stadt Rom verlesen werden. Auch Hieronymus scheint sich solcher Problematiken und der damit verbundenen Gerüchte zeitlebens bewusst gewesen zu sein, so bezeichnet er noch in ep. 127,5 nicht ohne Selbstironie die feminae clarissimae vom Aventin als "Weiblein" (mulierculae), deren Lobpreis zu singen einer gesonderten Rechtfertigung bedürfe. 6 Hier. ep. 22,32 mit Mk 12,41-44 und Lk 21,1-4, vgl. dazu Rebenich (2002) 37. Auch in ep. 40,2 wendet sich Hieronymus gegen die Mammon-Priester (nummarii sacerdotes), die sich finanzielle Vorteile von ihrer Beschäftigung mit reichen Matronen erhoffen. Im Jahre 376 oder 377 n. Chr. hatte sich Hieronymusin einem Brief an seinen späteren Gönner Damasusnoch als homo Romanus bezeichnet, vgl. Hier. ep. 15,3, dazu Sugano (1983) 15-16. Flavius Josephus, Hieronymus und die Eroberung Roms

Last year Frank Dikötter won the prestigious BBC Samuel Johnson prize for his book ‘Mao’s Great Famine’. The jury was impressed yet stunned that they didn’t know the full scale of the atrocities committed during the Great Leap Forward. Dikötter knocks Mao off his pedestal and reveals what he really was; a brutal and violent dictator. After the publication of his book the author received daily hate mail for over a year. In our interview he explains how his opponents’ arguments are the same used to deny the Holocaust.

PAUVRETE ET FAMINES ET AU MOYEN ÂGE. Nous avons deux images contradictoires du Moyen Âge : la première est celle d'une période tenaillée par l'angoisse de la faim, la peur de la disette et ravagée effectivement par des famines générales épouvantables. La seconde est celle d'un temps de développement économique, c'està-dire d'augmentation de la production agricole, de croissance démographique et d'enrichissement de la culture matérielle, bref de mieux être. Comment concilier les deux représentations, s'il est toutefois possible de le faire ? Nous sommes en face de plusieurs problèmes distincts dont certains sont particulièrement complexes. Le premier est celui du rythme et de l'intensité du développement économique. Le second, qui lui est lié mais d'une façon qu'il faut expliquer, est celui de la pauvreté. Un troisième est celui des conditions naturelles, et notamment climatiques et, de façon plus générale, des liens entretenus par les hommes avec la nature, qu'ils transforment mais subissent aussi 1. Ces questions font partie de celles que l'historiographie récente a le plus bouleversé, en remettant en cause des paradigmes que l'on croyait solidement ancrés. Insérer la question de la *

Geçen haftaki yazımda bu hafta Ukrayna'da 1932-33 yıllarında yaşanan açlık ve kıtlık konusunu ele alacağımı yazmıştım. Doğrusu öyle demiş olmasaydım bile bu hafta bu konuyu işlemek farz olacaktı, çünkü bizim Birgün'ün anti-Sovyetik saldırıları bitmek bilmiyor. 22 Kasım 2008 Cumartesi günkü Birgün gazetesinde Doğan Subaşı imzasıyla yayınlanan yazı inanılmaz bir şekilde Hitler'in propaganda bakanı Göbbels'le, emperyalizmle ve onun Ukraynalı uşaklarıyla aynı dili kullanarak Stalin'e ve Sovyet sosyalizmine pervasızca saldırıyor. Subaşı emperyalizmin propagandasını hiçbir eleştiri süzgecine tabi tutmadan aynen kabullenmiş görünüyor. Doğrusu şaşırmamak elde değil, bu ne biçim bir kindir, bu nasıl bir aymazlıktır, bu nasıl bir solculuktur anlamak mümkün değil. Kuşkusuz benim Birgün'le ya da yazarlarıyla hiçbir kişisel sorunum yok, yetersiz bulmama rağmen emekten yana bir gazete olduğu için Birgün gazetesini her gün alıyorum. Ancak sanırım eleştiri hakkım da var. Zaten sorun esas olarak Birgün'de değil, o olmasa da burjuva ideologlarıyla mücadele etmemiz gerekiyor. Ancak tuhaf olan Birgün'deki bazı yazarların SSCB söz konusu olduğunda takındığı ultra-liberal tavır.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the colonies controlled by the British, the Dutch, and other European countries witnessed a number of devastating famines. These famines did not solely arise for the ‘natural’ reasons of the shortage of rainfall or food availability problems, but were aggravated by the systemic imperialist exploitation of the world by these major European powers. Taking as its case study the two great famines in Ireland and India – the 1845–52 Irish Famine and the 1943–44 Bengal Famine – the essay offers a reading of Liam O'Flaherty's Famine (1937) and Bhabani Bhattacharya's So Many Hungers! (1947). It shows that these works – apart from registering the devastating impact of the famines on the colonial population – have pointed through their powerful uses of content, form, and style to the world-historical reasons of long-term agrarian crisis, political instability, tyranny of the landlord classes, inefficiency of the British Empire, and others as responsible for the famines.

Освещена деятельность организаций помощи голодающим в России, созданных дальневосточной русской эмиграцией в начале 1920-х годов. Проведен сравнительный анализ этих организаций с аналогичными структурами в Европе.
The object of article is Russian far-east emigrant relief organizations. It analyses their activities of gathering end sending food, industrial, financial and medical help to the starving Russian people. It compares these organizations with the similar, created  by Russian emigration in Europe.

The Great Leap Forward created one of the most deadly famines in human history, with estimates of the death toll ranging from 35 to 45 million. Environmentally, the leap caused the deforestation of at least a third of China’s open forests. This essay will explore why the Great Leap Forward proved to be so disastrous in so many areas, and why it failed to accomplish any of the objectives it set out to achieve. First, the essay will address the historiographical debate surrounding whether or not there was any sense in the original economic plan. The logic of diverting from a Soviet-style economic plan will then be discussed in conjunction with the equally illogical policies that followed, and their subsequent implementation. The essay will consider the context of the Sino-Soviet split and the Hundred Flowers campaign. With reference to both of these, Mao’s dominance and tenacious attitude will be discussed as key factors for the eventual disastrous outcome of the Great Leap Forward.

In 1997, during the commemorations of the 150th anniversary of the Great Irish Famine, the British Prime Minister of the time, Tony Blair, issued an apology on behalf of the British state. According to the statement, That one million people should have died in what was then part of the richest and most powerful nation in the world is something that still causes pain as we reflect on it today. Those who governed in London at the time failed their people through standing by while a crop failure turned into a massive human tragedy. The question of state response has indeed been the central political question in discussions of the Irish Famine. Ireland at the time formed part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, governed from London by a parliament in which Irish representatives were a minority. The perceived failure of the government and parliament in its responsibilities towards Ireland during the Famine became a central element in the mass political movements in favour of devolution or independence which dominated Irish politics in the later nineteenth century and which untimately led to independence.

This article adopts a socio-political lens in order to better understand the Somalia famine. As a result it draws out important continuities with the famine of the early 1990s as well as specific food security and vulnerability characteristics within Somalia which have largely been absent in discussions of the famine to date. 'Minority' populations were most affected in both famines and this identity overlaps with specific geographic areas and more sedentary, rural and agriculturally based livelihoods, distinct from other population groups. We argue that these dimensions, important in understanding long-term marginalization processes and outcomes, also help to understand the differential levels of risk and other complicating factors in the 2011 famine.

This chapter is one of the few publications, which compare two food crises: the Irish famine of 1845-1851 and the Finnish famine of 1866- 1868. It examines their similarities and differences. Both we attributed to natural shocks, which were, however, quite different – potato blight and summer frost respectively.

Book chapter on the role of film and television in Ethiopia's revolution, from Cine Ethiopia: The History and Politics of Film in the Horn of Africa, ed. Alessandro Jedlowski, Mike Thomas and Aboneh Ashagrie, (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2018)

The projected rise of extreme climate events has sparked fresh interest in how past societies handled similar challenges. However, while historical experiences of famine, migration, and ‘collapse’ act as silent referents to the current debate, few of these imaginaries are actually based on empirical studies. This book explores the European climate anomaly of the 1770s to study the dynamic interplay of environmental and social factors in ‘close-up’. It develops a dedicated socionatural approach to capture the entanglement of climate and culture and introduces a small-scale, high-resolution design. Methodologically it suggests a concept of socioecological vulnerability to study the way past societies have ‘socialized’ climate anomalies.
The decade at the centre of the book marks a spike of the Little Ice Age. During the anomaly of the 1770s a persistent cold/wet-complex struck European societies already weakened by social disparity, political fragility and economic transformation. The disastrous combination of climatic and cultural factors resulted in a ‘twinned catastrophe’. It escalated a string of poor harvests into a severe famine that impacted all of Europe and – through the spread of epidemics and epizootics – claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. The book uses a series of carefully situated case-studies to trace the human-environment-interactions of the crisis period through various societal fields. These close-ups illustrate how the socionatural extreme encouraged and legitimised mass-migration, antisemitism and virulent proto-nationalism. At the same time they reveal how the crisis fostered political reform, new scientific fields and early humanitarianism.
The book captures a fragile socioecological setting. It reconstructs the biophysical impacts by connecting the various ‘archives of nature’ and the ‘archives of society’, and places them within the Little Ice Age framework (Ch. 1+2). It then ties these inputs to the increasingly vulnerable socioecological arrangements of Europe’s historical ‘grain societies’ at the end of the Ancient Regime. Ch. 3 looks at the way the crisis was perceived. It charts how in the ‘laboratory’ situation of the crises, competing religious, natural or social interpretations informed and prefigured the physical responses available. Ch. 4 studies the wealth of contemporary practices. Case-studies at local level reveal how the crisis encouraged new forms of self-help and strategic migration. At regional level it initiated empowering interactions between sovereigns and subjects that initiated forms of ‘state-building-by-catastrophe’. In the wider realm of politics the famine legitimised power politics such as the Partition of Poland, while in the fields of science new groups of experts used the extreme weather to establish novel disciplinary fields (from public medicine and agronomy to meteorology). Ch. 5 analyses how the affected societies coped long-term. It studies material culture to reveal the highly selective way extreme socionatural events were memorised or forgotten, and argues that these processes framed the societal capacities for ecological adaptation.
The socionatural scope of the book not only challenges the various forms of social and climatic determinism. It also connects historical developments previously explored only in national/political settings – linking the protests of the Steelboys in Ireland with the absolutist coup in Sweden and the school reforms in Saxony. The socionatural close-up of the book reveals both the plurality of and the limitations to human responses. It suggests that more dynamic connections of climate and culture are both necessary and feasible.

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Am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts durchlebte Europa, im Zuge einer extremen Klimaanomalie der Kleinen Eiszeit eine der schwersten Hungerkrisen seiner Geschichte. Das fatale Zusammenspiel von Klima und Kultur machte sie zur »doppelten« Katastrophe. Ihre Auswirkungen erfassten den gesamten Kontinent und kosteten hunderttausende Menschen das Leben. Die Krise beförderte neben Ausgrenzung, Auswanderung und Antisemitismus aber auch politische Reformen, Humanitarismus und neue Wissenschaften. Das Buch zeigt am Beispiel dieses Ereignisses, wie frühere Gesellschaften Witterungsextreme bewältigten und wie vielfältig Klimaimpulse »sozialisiert« werden konnten. Dominik Collet plädiert für einen integrativen, sozionaturalen Zugang zur Geschichte. Es erzählt eine Verflechtungsgeschichte von Mensch und Umwelt, in der kurzfristige Ereignisse und langfristige, sozioökologische Strukturen eng miteinander verkoppelt sind. Daher offenbart der Blick auf die Hungersnot schlaglichtartig grundlegende ökonomische und ökologische Problemlagen der Gesellschaften des 18. Jahrhunderts. In diesem Umfeld erweisen sich vermeintliche Naturkatastrophen immer auch als Kulturkatastrophen. Die Studie stellt deterministische Zugänge in Frage und zeigt, dass eine dynamische Perspektive auf das Zusammenwirken von Klima und Kultur ebenso notwendig wie praktikabel ist. Sie regt dazu an, die Natur nicht länger als Gegenteil, sondern als Teil der Geschichte zu begreifen.