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The Great Persian Famine of 1917–1919 is one of the greatest calamities in the history of Iran. While some scholarly work has explored the causes and dynamics of the famine, less attention has been paid to its memorialisation. This paper aims to understand how the Great Persian Famine is remembered – or not – in public and personal spheres in Iran. Discussing the historical events that have been silenced, neglected or publicly recognised and commemorated before and after the Islamic Revolution, the paper focusses on the processes that hinder public and private memorialising of hunger violence. Drawing on existing literature, personal diaries, artistic representations, and interviews with persons whose parents or grandparents experienced the Great Persian Famine, we discuss why it has not figured prominently in the national historiography or commemorative practices, except during a brief period (2008–2013) when it found its way into the prevailing political discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Bengal famine of 1943 is one of the most catastrophic and violent outcomes of British colonial rule in India. Recently, there has been a surge in understanding the famine from an anti-colonial perspective. However, the relation between the impact of the famine and caste-based subalternities has not received adequate attention. The immediate concerns that arise with the task of filling this gap are ethical-methodological and narrative: even from the lens of caste-subaltern consciousness, how does one arrive at and share stories of the famine, and can they ever be 'recovered' and 'represented'? This paper narrates the story of fieldwork-filming, carried out as part of ongoing research in artistic practice, which attempts to understand and engage with caste-subaltern (especially Dalit) experiences of the Bengal famine of 1943 and to explore methodologically how these experiences can be creatively and collaboratively imagined and negotiated. The paper proposes that there is a need to shift away from 'recovery' and 'representation' of the 'authentic' caste-subaltern experiences of the famine and towards negotiated imagination. To illustrate and make a case for this shift, this paper provides a detailed description and analysis of methodological processes and their implications that emerged during the fieldwork-filming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the role of social media in the memorialisation of the Biafra famine. It argues that given the absence of Biafra famine narratives in the official post-Civil War memory spaces in Nigeria, social media has emerged as a site where silence and hegemonic discourses around the Biafra famine are disrupted, contested and unmoored. Thus, the study contributes to the contemporary debates on digital media and memorialisation of mass atrocities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Processes of justice and accountability have long overlooked the death and suffering resulting from famines. This article examines how various domestic and international actors involved in the Red Terror Trials (1992–2010) framed the 1984–1985 famine in Ethiopia and what explains the absence of famine-related cases from the trials. Based on archival sources and interviews, the article discusses how the Red Terror Trials offered an opportunity to prosecute famine-related cases. The study shows, however, that despite the framing of the famine as 'political' and an act of crime by various actors, the Red Terror Trials were silent about the famine. One explanation is the difficulty of establishing a legal case based on famine-related casualties, coupled with a lack of incentive as there were already enough criminal cases to prosecute former Dergue regime officials. The complicated political history of the famine and its causes, which might implicate various domestic and international actors and not just the Dergue officials, can also explain the absence of the famine-related cases from the trials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite its devastating impact on the population, the 1977–1979 famine in East Timor scarcely features in global studies of hunger. This article traces how the famine was dealt with in international politics during the Indonesian occupation (1975–1999), and in Timor-Leste during the United Nations administration and as an independent nation-state. The East Timor case extends our knowledge of the workings of conflict-induced famines, provides insights into the attempts by transnational activists and diasporic actors to mobilise international action on crises such as famine, and examines the options for dealing with famine and its community-wide legacies in post-conflict societies including under a transitional justice model. By analysing the activities of the country's transitional justice institution, the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (Comissão de Acolhimento, Verdade e Reconciliação, CAVR) and its successor, the Centro Nacional Chega! (CNC), as well as grassroots initiatives, the article outlines some of the challenges of delivering justice for famine victims and survivors in post-conflict societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the literature echoes the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)'s official explanation of the Great Leap Famine (1959–1961) to argue that the Party survived the legitimacy crisis posed by the famine by blaming the weather. While several have suggested that the CCP held the local cadres responsible for generating the famine, little evidence had been gathered to show how this was done. This article reconciles the above arguments by asserting that the CCP, by exploiting the urban–rural informational asymmetry, employed a dual propaganda approach that combined an urban explanation that blamed the weather with a more important rural strategy that admitted the famine's man-made nature but shifted the blame onto local leaders, to direct the responsibility away from the Party centre. By leveraging local government archives in Henan Province's Nanyang Prefecture, this study analyses how the Party propagated the rural explanation through the Rural Party Rectification Movement (1960–1961) to placate immediate peasantry discontent and reconstruct long-run famine memories. Interviews conducted in 2021 show that the re-engineering of the famine narrative contributed to the peasants' distrust of local cadres. This perception persisted over time, at least partially affecting the peasants' willingness to cooperate with local policies in the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how the people and landscape of the Bay of Bengal came to be cast in terms of what Giorgio Agamben called 'bare life' – a people without the protection or mandate of sovereign law – in the international discourse of the early 1970s. This was a period marked in the emerging nation of Bangladesh by cyclone, war and famine. International actors were influenced by Malthusian notions of the need for 'triage' in relation to international food security, but also by counter-currents marked by a humanitarian impulse to aid this disaster-prone and populous poor country. This article discusses prominent examples of the framing of the Bangladesh development challenge as a Herculean effort of uncertain outcome, arguing that this framing licensed a kind of humanitarian experimentalism that has pervaded Bangladesh's national development project, and shaped international development more broadly. Geopolitics exert biopower over the Bangladeshi population in new and different ways, but the nation state now exercises greater control over the conditions of bare life than in the 1970s, and is better able to protect its people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines methodological avenues for a historical sociology of development through a close reading of Naomi Hossain's recent book, The Aid Lab: Understanding Bangladesh's Unexpected Success (2017). Hossain's conjunctural perspective, the formative moment of Bangladesh in environmental catastrophe, war and famine in the 1970s, establishes a novel account of the country's development trajectory. Contingencies of the moment and consequent political uncertainties committed an emergent national elite to a largely informal but substantive social compact against future crises of subsistence. The result was a specific, transnational power configuration rendering Bangladesh a test case for developmental interventions and the production of knowledge regarding them. Debates in critical development studies have often posited that such 'elite commitment' is a consequence and not so much a precondition for social improvement, brought about through struggles from 'below.' How might these positions be reconciled by shifting the temporal frames of reference? By rendering historical processes legible as conflicting and complementary interactions between different social forces and actors? How can such actors be envisaged without presuming their identities and interests as fixed or given, but rather, as shaping and being shaped by such processes? These questions motivate the immanent critique and reappraisal of Hossain's timely work, highlighting its significance for dynamic analyses of historical capitalism today through the 'universal particularities' of the national case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]