The Coloniality of Measuring Famine | Newcastle Law School

Against the background of several judicial proceedings resulting from the starvation campaigns in Mariupol in 2022, as well as in Sudan and Palestine since 2023, this paper zooms in on the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification scale. This scale is used to measure acute food insecurity, i.e., food insecurity resulting from extreme weather, or from conflict. It hopes to show how contemporary starvation governance has made a deliberate effort to obscure the intentionality of mass starvation by foregrounding the term ‘famine’. Consequently, famine has been redefined as a technical term to describe a material condition, devoid of history and politics. As a result, the term ‘famine’ is now misleadingly associated with the suffering of a community from prolonged hunger due to misfortune, rather than as a consequence of oppression, dispossession, alienation, or genocidal intent. By sanitising famine from starvation—that is, from the act of creating the material and social conditions of famine—contemporary global starvation governance has regressed from the understanding of famine put forth by eminent famine theorist and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, as well as from that articulated by the World Food Summit in 1974, which understood famine as a result of alien and colonial domination, foreign occupation, racial discrimination, apartheid, and neo-colonialism, activated, or made worse by political, economic, or ecological crises.

Speaker biography

Dr Lys Kulamadayil is an international law scholar at the Geneva Graduate Institute, where she is a Swiss National Science Foundation Ambizione Fellow, serving as principal investigator of the project Law by Colour Code: Locating Race and Racism in International Law. Her research interests span extractivism, mineral resource governance, the legal regulation of food and ecosystems, human rights, economic law, legal theory and philosophy, as well as international law’s role in social hierarchies, particularly with regard to racism and ableism. She has published widely on these subjects in peer-reviewed journals, including the London Review of International Law, the Leiden Journal of International Law, Transnational Legal Theory, and the Journal of the History of International Law. She is also the author of the monograph The Pathology of Plenty: Natural Resources in International Law.

Currently, Dr Kulamadayil serves as a research advisor to the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food for which she is based at the German Institute of Human Rights. Prior to joining the Geneva Graduate Institute, she was a Senior Research Fellow at Helmut-Schmidt University and worked in the humanitarian affairs division of the German Federal Foreign Office. Dr Kulamadayil was previously awarded a grant by the Swiss National Science Foundation to undertake post-doctoral research on a project names Depleted Fortunes at the Amsterdam Center for International Law. She also completed visiting fellowships at the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna and Harvard Law School. As a faculty member or mentor, she has contributed to various doctoral programmes and doctoral mentoring schemes, including at the University of Amsterdam, Sciences Po, and as part of the the LPE in Europe project, the International Economic Law Collective, and the Law and Society Association.

Dr Kulamadayil holds an LL.B. jointly awarded by the Universities of Bremen, Oldenburg, and Groningen, an LL.M. from the London School of Economics, and a PhD in International Law from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies.