Starvation as a Weapon of War

90 years since the Holodomor famine, experts discuss the weaponisation of hunger in Ukraine and globally, the importance of memorialising past famines for the understanding of mass starvation today, and the tools of international law to fight for accountability for these crimes. 28 November 2023.
In 1932-33, the Stalinist regime attempted to starve Ukrainians into subjugation through a man-made famine, known as the Holodomor. Today, Russia once again uses hunger as a weapon in its full-scale war against Ukraine. Siege tactics and the obstruction of humanitarian aid have left Ukrainian civilians without food and water. In addition, Russia continues to threaten global food security by blockading Ukraine’s grain exports to Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Warfare is one of the main drivers of mass starvation globally. Yet, the crime of starvation has rarely been prosecuted.
Speaker
Daria Mattingly is a lecturer in European history at the University of Chichester and an Affiliated Lecturer in Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge. She received her doctoral degree from the University of Cambridge, where she has been teaching Soviet and Russian history as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow. After providing research assistance to Anne Applebaum for her book on the Holodomor, Mattingly is currently finishing her monograph on the rank-and-file perpetrators of the famine. Her most recent academic publications include “Sexual Violence During Collectivization and the Holodomor,” Women’s Dimensions of the Past: Perceptions, Experiences, Representations, ed. Oksana Kis (Lviv: Centre for Urban History, 2023) and “Stalinism and the Holodomor,” Ukraine’s Many Faces: Land, People, and Culture Revisited, eds. Olena Palko and Manuel Férez Gil (Beilefeld: Transcript, 2023).
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 conflict, food security and related issues since the 1980s as a researcher and practitioner. He served as a senior advisor to the African Union High Level Panel on Sudan and South Sudan. He was listed among Foreign Policy’s 100 most influential international intellectuals in 2008 and Atlantic’s 29 ‘brave thinkers’ in 2009. De Waal’s recent books include: The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa: Money, War and the Business of Power (Polity 2015), Mass Starvation: The history and future of famine (Polity 2018), and New Pandemics, Old Politics: 200 years of the war on disease and its alternatives (Polity 2021).
Speaker
Catriona Murdoch is one of the partners at Global Rights Compliance. Murdoch is an expert in International Criminal Law and recognised as a world-leading expert in the war crime of starvation, associated starvation violations and right to food abuses. She has over 15 years’ experience in international law, and joined GRC in 2016, becoming partner in 2020. Murdoch is ranked as a leading practitioner in the UK Chambers and Partners and Legal 500 directories and has been involved in GRC’s DPRK work since 2019. She has extensive international litigation experience before the UN IRMCT, ICC and ICTR courts and tribunals, advising on crimes arising out of the Rwandan Genocide, the Iraq war, and the war in the former Yugoslavia. Murdoch leads GRC’s Starvation Mobile Justice Team in Ukraine, part of GRC’s dedicated units supporting Ukraine’s Office of the Prosecutor General. This investigation is part of the UK, EU and US-sponsored Atrocity Crimes Advisory Group (ACA).
Moderator
Kateryna Busol is a Ukrainian lawyer specialising in international humanitarian, criminal law, transitional justice, gender and cultural heritage. She is an Associate Professor at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and a British Academy Research Fellow at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law. Kateryna Busol has worked with the Clooney Foundation for Justice, UN Women, Global Survivors Fund as well as with Global Rights Compliance. She has collaborated with Ukrainian NGOs such as the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union, Media Initiative for Human Rights and Truth Hounds and advised the Office of the Prosecutor General, the Prosecutor’s Office of Crimea and the National School of Judges of Ukraine on armed conflict-related proceedings.
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