Tom Dannenbaum (Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy) has posted Criminalizing Starvation in an Age of Mass Deprivation in War: Intent, Method, Form, and Consequence (Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
We live in an era of mass starvation in war. Belligerents across a range of conflicts have attacked humanitarian workers, destroyed, looted, or rendered unusable food and food sources, and engaged in comprehensive siege warfare, sequestering populations from key sources of essential goods. Millions have been left in famine or on the brink thereof.
The scale and prevalence of this phenomenon have contributed to growing calls for accountability. Traditional criminal categories are not promising. The situation and nature of objects indispensable to survival is such that they typically provide sustenance to both civilians and combatants; the conduct that deprives people of those objects often involves acting on the objects, rather than acting directly on the affected persons; and the causal chain from deprivation to civilian suffering is long and complex. Appropriately, attention has turned instead towards the recently codified and largely untested war crime of starvation of civilians as a method of warfare.
Whether and how this framework can underpin a legal response to mass deprivation hinges on how key debates as to the crime’s meaning are resolved. This Article enters those debates, debunks the common view that the starvation war crime attaches only to conduct that seeks to weaponize the civilian suffering associated with starvation, and offers a distinct theory according to which the crime should be understood transitively as focused primarily on the act of deprivation, rather the suffering it produces. The recommended approach would fundamentally reshape how we think about the crime, with particularly acute implications for the regulation of sieges or blockades.
Highly recommended.