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Abstract
This article offers a preliminary checklist for identifying the geopolitical motivations of decision makers responsible for major famines, events defined as economic and social crises causing one million or more excess deaths. Three geopolitical motivations are identified in three major famines in the twentieth century. The 1932–1933 Ukrainian famine illustrates the strategy of starving a geographically concentrated, politically distrusted minority into submission and repopulating areas with politically trustworthy settlers and indoctrinated or assimilated traumatized famine survivors. The 1943 Bengal famine illustrates the starvation of politically distrusted populations in areas likely to be lost to invasion to make consolidation of that conquest expensive and to impede further conquest. The 1994–1995 North Korean famine illustrates the starvation of population in areas that pose a lesser risk of catastrophic regime delegitimation. Given the near certain decrease in grain production and probable declines in livestock production and fish catch in the Global South anticipated with climate change, decision makers are likely to be tempted to execute major famines to realize these geopolitical objectives. The geopolitical advantage from major famine thus merits the attention of famine-studies scholars.
Notes
Notes
1 Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001).
2 Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 177; Boris Kagarlitsky, Empire of the Periphery: Russia and the World System (London: Pluto Press, 2008), 133.
3 Felix Wemheuer, Famine Politics in Maoist China and the Soviet Union (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 35–36, 77–153; Jason W. Clay and Bonnie K. Holcumb, Politics and the Ethiopian Fame, 1984–1985 (Cambridge, MA: Cultural Survival, 1986), 26–29; 179–193.
4 Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
5 Jonathan D. Smele, The “Russian” Civil Wars, 1916–1926: Ten Years that Shook the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 214–215; Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, 55–57.
6 Michael Jabara Carley, Silent Conflict: A Hidden History of Early Soviet-Western Relations (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 77, 143, 174–175; Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (New York: Anchor Books, 2017), 370–371; Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, 319–320.
7 Stepen Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929–1941 (New York: Penguin, 2017), 129.
8 Plokhy, The Gates of Europe, 254.
9 Sarah Cameron, The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018); Robert Kindler, Stalin’s Nomads: Power and Famine in Kazakhstan (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018); Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, 190–192.
10 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” The Revolutions of 1848, edited by David Fernbach (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 71.
11 Ronald Grigor Suny, The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 89–90.
12 Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, translated by George Shriver (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 232–237.
13 Kotkin, Stalin, 117.
14 George O. Lider, Total Wars and the Making of Modern Ukraine, 1914–1954 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 136–137, 156–157; Timothy D. Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 23, 41, 79.
15 Applebaum, Red Famine, 75–76; Kotkin, Stalin, 49.
16 Ibid., 107.
17 Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, 170–171.
18 Applebaum, Red Famine, 157; Stephan Kotkin. Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 80–82.
19 Suny, The Soviet Experiment, 140–141.
20 Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, 334–335.
21 Smele. The “Russian” Civil Wars, 61–62.
22 Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, 217–224.
23 Applebaum, Red Famine, 39–40; Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, 96–97.
24 Suny, The Soviet Experiment, 227–228.
25 Appelbaum, Red Famine, 343–349; Snyder, Bloodlands, 52.
26 Karl Marx, “Indian Affairs,” The New York Daily News, July 19, 1853, republished in Karl Marx, Surveys from Exile, edited by David Fernbach. (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 316–318.
27 John Hickman, “Orwellian Rectification: Popular Churchill Biographies and the 1943 Bengal Famine,” Studies in History 24, 2 n.s. (2008): 235–243.
28 Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy, 4th ed. (London: Routledge, 2018), 141–142.
29 Lizzie Collingham, The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (New York: Penguin Books, 2011), 141–143.
30 Ibid., 146.
31 Madhusree Mukerjee, Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II (New York: Basic Books, 2010).
32 Ibid., 57–64; 89–97; 246–247.
33 Janam Mukherjee, Hungry Bengal: War, Famine, Riots and the End of Empire (Noida, India: Harper Collins, 2015), 55–78, 87–88.
34 Ibid., 59.
35 Field Marshal Viscount William Slim, Defeat into Victory: Battling Japan in Burma and India, 1942–1945 (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000), 128.
36 Richard Stevenson, Bengal Tiger and British Lion: An Account of the Bengal Famine of 1943 (New York: iUniverse, 2005), 77–78. See also Lawrence James, Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 426–428.
37 Stevenson, Bengal Tiger, 70–72.
38 Ibid., 72.
39 Timothy H. Parsons, The Second British Empire: In the Crucible of the Twentieth Century (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), 111–112.
40 Motoko Rich et al., “How South Korea Left the North Behind,” The New York Times, February 6, 2018, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/02/06/world/asia/korea-history.html (accessed January 22, 2019).
41 Andrew S. Natsios. The Great North Korean Famine (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2001), 10; Stephen Haggard and Marcus Noland, Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid and Reform (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 26–34.
42 Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2009), 64–67
43 Kongdan Oh and Ralph C. Hassig, North Korea: Through the Looking Glass (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2000), 56.
44 Ibid., 65.
45 Ibid., 50.
46 B. R. Myers, The Cleanest Race: How North Koreas See Themselves –And Why It Matters (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2010), 43.
47 Sandra Fahy, Marching through Suffering: Loss and Survival in North Korea (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 26–34.
48 Bradley K. Martin, Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2004), 557–559.
49 Bruce M. Campbell et al, “Reducing Risks to Food Security from Climate Change,” Global Food Security 11 (2016): 34–43, 37.
50 Ibid.
51 Michael Burke et al., “Global Non-Linear Effect of Temperature on Economic Production,” Nature 527 (November 12, 2015): 235, /www.nature.com/nature/journal/v527/n7577/full/nature15725.html (accessed January 25, 2019).
52 Liette Connolly-Boutin and Barry Smit, “Climate Change, Food Security, and Livelihoods in Sub-Saharan Africa,” Regional Environmental Change 16 (2016): 385–399, 387.
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Notes on contributors
John Hickman
John Hickman (jhickman@berry.edu) is a professor of political science at Berry College, where he teaches courses on comparative politics, international relations, and research methods. Before earning a PhD in political science from the University of Iowa, he earned an MA in political science from the University of Missouri, Columbia, and a JD from Washington University, St. Louis. He served as a Woodrow Wilson Administrative Fellow at Florida A & M University in Tallahassee, Florida, and taught at Reitaku University in Tokyo. He is the author of the 2013 University of Florida Press book Selling Guantánamo: Exploding the Propaganda Surrounding America's Most Notorious Military Prison, soon to be published in a Spanish-language translation.