Dr Caitriona Dowd is an Assistant Professor in UCD’s School of Politics and International Relations (SPIRe). This post describes a workshop on Conflict & Hunger: New and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. The workshop was organised by Dr Dowd with the generous support of the PSAI’s Peace and Conflict Specialist Group. The UCD Africa Engagement Seed Fund kindly facilitated the participation of African scholars from the University of Ibadan and Gulu University, and the NUI provided the workshop venue.
In his speech marking National Famine Commemoration Day on the 19th of May 2024, Taoiseach Simon Harris reflected on the ‘indelible mark’ the Great Famine left on Irish society and national identity. Ireland’s own history of hunger and its catastrophic human cost made it, the Taoiseach maintained, ‘repellent to our psyche to witness famine unfolding in Gaza as a tool of war’ (Department of the Taoiseach, 2024). That same week, on the 15th of May, scholars from across Ireland and beyond met in Dublin to examine precisely the questions of how, and in what ways, hunger and starvation intersect with insecurity and violence, through what drivers, and with what consequences?
In a workshop entitled Conflict & Hunger: New and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, scholars from political science, peace and conflict studies, economics, history, sociology, anthropology, and data science amongst others, came together to explore different dimensions of the conflict-hunger nexus. While it is well-established that conflict is one of the – if not the single – greatest drivers of food crises worldwide (FSIN, 2024), advances in our understanding of this phenomenon have been hampered by the slow integration of insights from discrete disciplines.
In the workshop, peace and conflict researchers from University College Dublin, Dublin City University, the University of Sussex and the humanitarian organisation, Insecurity Insight, all drew attention to the value analysis of the micro-dynamics of conflict – from disaggregating conflict actors to the tactics employed – in seeking to better understand conflict’s multi-sited and co-occurring impacts on food systems and food security outcomes. Scholars from UCD’s MSc in Politics & Data Science found common ground with humanitarian research from the University of Manchester, highlighting the important role of food in peacebuilding. Insights from history, agricultural economics and humanitarian response all explored neglected dimensions, resources, or food system components that serve to complicate the once-common framing of food crises as seemingly ‘natural’ disasters. Instead, richly detailed case studies from Indian and African contexts revealed the expressly political and context-specific contours of food insecurity. Lastly, a panel on intersectionality highlighted the less visible ways in which gender shapes experiences of food access and denial, converging on and compounding other inequities in land, resource ownership and financial power within and across households.
The workshop deliberately sought to bring together a broad range of perspectives on the intersection of food insecurity and violent conflict. Engaging across disciplinary and methodological boundaries illuminated multiple avenues for future research, between cross-national analysis and micro-level case studies; leveraging economic and health data, alongside reflections on the lived experience – and long shadow – of starvation in war; and disaggregating categories of enquiry both within large datasets, and in the conceptualisation of identity in rapidly changing societies. What each of the contributions shared was a commitment to challenging a conventional, narrowly technical and often highly individualised conception of hunger and food insecurity. They spotlighted instead the political dimensions of broader trends and trajectories, and the highly collective and socially significant shared experience of food crisis. Workshop participants have a number of manuscripts in progress and several have plans to reconvene with updated papers in future fora.
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