Hunger in global war economies: understanding the decline and return of famines

Abstract

The resurgence of famines is a topic of concern. This paper explains the recent trajectory using the framework of contending ‘global war economies’. It characterises the unipolar neoliberal world order era (1986–2015) as the ‘Pax Americana’ war economy, focusing on the United States dollar's roles. These were the decades of the liberal imperium, the corporate food regime, and counterinsurgent coalitions, which generated structural vulnerability to food crises and reduced the actual incidence and lethality of famine. The paper characterises the subsequent period (2016 onwards) as the challenge of the BRICS club, focusing on its efforts to rewrite the global political economy's rules, proactively hedging among diversifying currency regimes. This entails a scramble to secure strategic commodities and infrastructure in subaltern countries, which is intensifying conflict and food insecurity, and revising international norms in favour of reasserting sovereign rights. The global political–economic contestation and, especially, the associated normative regression are permissive of political and military triggers of famine.

1. INTRODUCTION

What caused the historic decline and resurgence of famines in the contemporary world? In this paper I present a framework, utilising the concept of global war economies, to help explain both the unprecedented diminution in the number and lethality of famines in the era of globalisation, and their resurgence since 2016.

I begin with an overview of the changing character and scale of famines over the past 40 years. The start date for the analysis is the mid‐1980s, a time when the Cold War thawed, political liberalism and economic neoliberalism began their respective advances, the global food regime based on corporate agro‐industries consolidated, and the United States' military spending surged. Notwithstanding the high‐profile calamities in Ethiopia and Sudan in 1984–85, the incidence and lethality of famines were already in decline, and increasingly restricted to war famines in Northeast Africa. This trend continued until approximately 2015, after which famines have become more frequent and more lethal, across a wider span of Africa and the Middle East.

The war economy lens examines how empires, states, and subaltern polities (weak states, state‐like entities, and non‐state actors) secure resources for military dominance, how they impose deprivation on their adversaries, and how they seek to legitimise those actions. This approach brings the structural drivers and proximate triggers of famine into a unified analysis.

The story begins with the era of globalisation (1986–2015), reframing liberal political and neoliberal economic dominance as the Pax Americana neo‐imperial war economy. This was based on the twin foundations of the global dollar regime and US military hegemony, also manifest in the soft power of liberal multilateral norms and institutions. The combination of more democratic political orders, fewer wars, widespread poverty reduction, cheap food, and an expanding ‘humanitarian international’ contributed to a reduction in famines. But this historic success concealed contradictions that duly emerged. The corporate neoliberal economic order created structural vulnerability to hunger. The boom in extractive industries and security assistance to weak states, along with the financialisation of politics, created rentier political markets, and the political business model of the post‐2001 ‘Global War on Terror’ consolidated military kleptocracies across much of Africa, the Middle East, and central Asia, which in turn, created a permissive environment for wars of hunger. The US's weaponisation of the dollar, through an expansive regime of sanctions and conditionalities, led to targeted hardship and burden‐shifting, deepening resistance among states that resented the loss of or threat to financial sovereignty.

Next I turn to the current era (2016 onwards), framing this as a contest between contending global war economies. I identify the centre of gravity of the resistance to the Pax Americana as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) club and its project of rewriting the international economic and political rulebook, based on a reassertion of the sovereign entitlements of states, centered upon escaping the hegemony of the US dollar. The expansion of the BRICS on 1 January 2024 to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) (with Saudi Arabia remaining undecided) confirmed a shift in geo‐financial strategy towards proactive currency regime hedging, based on strategies of strategic resource encumbrance and infrastructure control. It also signalled a shift in geographical focus to the Red Sea Arena, the crossroads for world trade. Across this wider region, the contests between Pax Americana and the BRICS, and among BRICS members, intensify subaltern war economies. Most importantly for the question of famine, this clash creates a permissive normative environment for the perpetration of starvation crimes with impunity and the rollback of international humanitarian action.

2. THE CHANGING PATTERN OF FAMINE

Famines are extreme scarcities of food or purchasing power that directly cause increased mortality from starvation or hunger‐related disease (Sen, 1981, p. 40; Ó Gráda, 2009, p. 4). Famines can be measured on the dimensions of severity, magnitude, and duration (Howe and Devereux, 2004). The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC; IPC Global Partners, 2021) system uses severity as its metric, while comparative historical accounts use magnitude (Devereux, 2000; de Waal, 2017). Great famines are those in which excess mortality is greater than 100,000.

In this paper, the category ‘famine’ is defined expansively. It includes episodes of forced mass starvation, in wartime or during campaigns of genocide, ethnic cleansing, or extermination. It also includes complex catastrophes, which are defined as complex emergencies in which there is heightened protracted general mortality from a range of causes, such as food emergencies, the collapse of health systems, mass displacement, and societal breakdown. Some cases in the catalogue are hybrids of these different subcategories.

Table 1 presents the catalogue of great famines since 1985. In cases that are recognised as mass mortality events of the required scale, but for which data are entirely lacking or where food crisis is a secondary factor in a complex catastrophe, the estimate for excess deaths is ‘100,000+’.

TABLE 1.

Great famines, 1985–2023.

Date	Location	Proximate causes	Excess deaths
1983–85	Ethiopia	War, drought	800,000
1984–85	Sudan (Darfur, Kordofan and Red Sea)	Drought, economic neglect	240,000
1987–91	Mozambique	War, drought	300,000
1988	Sudan (southern)	War, state collapse	250,000
1991–93	Somalia	War, state collapse	240,000
1992–94	Sudan (Nuba Mountains and Upper Nile)	War, forced displacement	225,000
1995–97	North Korea	Food shortage, government policy	330,000
1998–99	Sudan (southern)	War, state collapse	100,000+
1998–2002	Democratic Republic of the Congo	War, mass atrocities, state collapse	290,000
2003–05	Sudan (Darfur)	War, mass atrocities	200,000
2003–06	Uganda (northern)	War, mass atrocities	100,000+
2011	Somalia	War, state collapse, drought	258,000
2012–23	Syria	War	100,000+
2014–18	South Sudan	War, state collapse	193,000
2016–19	Nigeria (northeast)	War	340,000
2016–21	Yemen	War, state collapse	223,000
2020–23	Central African Republic	War, state collapse	100,000+
2021–22	Ethiopia (Tigray)	War	336,000

Source: author, based on World Peace Foundation (2024).

The catalogue excludes a larger number of instances generally categorised as ‘famine’ in which the death toll fell short of the 100,000 threshold. For the 1985–2009 period, this includes Madagascar (1986), southeast Ethiopia (2001), Malawi (2002), and Niger (2005). Between 2010 and July 2024, the IPC's Famine Review Committee (FRC) considered evidence for possible famine 20 times, including in South Sudan (six times), Somalia (four), Gaza (three), Ethiopia and Yemen (twice each), and Madagascar, Nigeria, and Sudan (once each). The FRC determined famine in Somalia (2011), Nigeria (2016), South Sudan (2017 and 2020), and Sudan (2024). It ‘projected’ famine in northern Gaza in June 2024. Other recent candidates for inclusion in the expanded catalogue of food emergencies include Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Mali, and the Rohingya areas of Myanmar.

Table 2 summarises the trend in aggregate lethality of great famines over recent decades, including data from the previous century to provide comparison.

TABLE 2.

Mortality in great famines.

Years	Total estimated deaths	Average annual deaths
1870–1964	134,983,200	1,420,875
1965–74	3,551,000	355,100
1975–84	2,283,000	228,300
1985–94	1,315,000	131,500
1995–2004	870,000	87,000
2005–14	463,300	46,300
2015–23	1,236,700	137,411

Source: author, based on World Peace Foundation (2024).

Notwithstanding the significant problems with data reliability and commensurability, there is evidence of a dramatic decline in famines from the 1960s to the early 2010s, and then a subsequent rise. There are many correlates of this trajectory. Trends in chronic malnutrition, numbers in need of humanitarian assistance, and food prices also reveal long decreases followed by increases, although closer correlations have yet to be investigated. A decades‐long improvement in indices for world hunger stalled in 2014 (von Grebmer et al., 2015) and then reversed. According to figures of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (UN), the number of undernourished people worldwide fell from 793 million in 2005 to 563 million in 2014, before rising to 783 million in 2022 (FAO, n.d.). UN figures for those needing humanitarian assistance rose from 125 million in 2014 to 363 million in 2023 (UN OCHA, 2023). Meanwhile, global food prices decreased from the 1970s to the 2000s, and increased thereafter, with peaks in 2008, 2011, and 2022 (FAO, 2024).

The decline in famines also broadly tracked the decline in autocracies, military coups, and armed conflicts up to the mid‐2010s, consistent with the broad association among democracy, freedom of the press, and famine prevention (Sen, 2000; Rubin, 2011). The subsequent rise in famine deaths also tracks increases in conflicts and one‐sided violence (World Peace Foundation, 2024). This is consistent with the observation, evident from Table 1, that the proximate causes of recent famines are overwhelmingly associated with armed conflict. The geographical distribution of famines in the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth century was primarily Asia and Eastern Europe, with Africa and the Middle East accounting for a smaller share. Since 1986, almost all have been in Africa and the Middle East, with a few outliers such as Madagascar, Malawi, and North Korea.

These factors suggest that the trend line is overdetermined, with many competing explanations. However, famines are rare and singular events. Any systematic explanatory schema should integrate economic and political, structural, and proximate causes. What follows is an effort to develop precisely such a comprehensive framework.

3. THE WAR ECONOMY LENS

This is an analytical frame that brings together three literatures on war and economics. The first is the classic framing of the ‘war economy’ as state‐led reorganisation of the market economy to provide and pay for war, with Germany and Great Britain during the First World War of 1914–18 serving as paradigmatic cases (Galbraith, 2001). The second is the economics of liberal mercantile empire. And the third concerns subaltern polities or ‘non‐state war economies’ and focuses on the fusion of armed conflict and illicit commerce (Di Cosmo, Fassin, and Pinaud, 2021). This places the economic organisation of warfare within the political economy of state formation, deformation, and collapse, blurring the distinction between states and other entities that have features of states. It also takes account of how criminal networks penetrate armies and may cross battle lines so that ostensible enemies can collude (Keen, 2005; Sarkar et al., 2021). A global war economy is a war economy in the contemporary era of globalisation. These will be examined in the subsequent sections.

The war economy lens brings together theories of money, markets, political power, servitude, and starvation. A seventeenth century visitor to Ethiopia wrote that famine was common on account of the visitations of locusts and ‘the marching of soldiers … which is a plague worse than [the locusts] because the locusts devour only what they find in the fields but [soldiers] spare not what is laid up in houses’ (B. Tellez, quoted in Perham, 1969, p. 163). In his magisterial Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber (2011, p. 248) makes the case that, rather than face the prospect of their subjects being reduced to starvation in this way, ancient rulers appear to have invented coinage, setting in train ‘the mercenary logic of Axia Age warfare … that came to conquer government itself, and define its very purpose’. Linkages between taxation and predation, war‐making, and state formation are a staple of the comparative historical literature (Olson, 1983; Tilly, 1993; North, Wallis, and Weingast, 2009). This is economics' original sin: the association between armies, subjugation, and famine is the point of origin of money and markets, and today's financial capitalism is their direct descendant.

3.1. Mobilising resources

All war economies, whether imperial, state, or subaltern, whether liberal, command, or criminal, contain markets, but these are regulated, so that ‘rent’ instead of ‘profit’ is a more accurate description of the gains made. A substantial part of that rent is in turn invested in mechanisms of coercion. For all of these kinds of polity, the war economy lens poses the same three questions: what mechanisms do rulers use to secure material and financial resources for coercion, deprive their adversaries, and legitimise those actions?

The mobilisation of labour, material, and finance for the purposes of waging war involves forcible acquisition of commodities and assets, extraction from producers and traders, and/or the use of monetary mechanisms. The most straightforward and time‐honoured method is plunder—combining war provisioning with depriving the enemy. This can range from pillaging a conquered territory—examples include the Central Asian empires of Genghis Khan and Timur (Di Cosmo, 2021) and Germany's Operation Barbarossa of 1941 and the associated Hunger Plan (Gesine, 2015)—to confiscating the financial assets of an adversary (which Britain refused to do during its imperial heyday, but the US has done with respect to Afghanistan and Russia).

Rosella Cappella Zielinski (2016, p. 6) has explored the historical specifics of nineteenth and twentieth century American, European, and Japanese war financing, concluding that ‘[p]olitical costs, shaped by public support for the war, dictate leaders’ preferences for direct or indirect resource extraction or an external war finance policy to avoid the citizenry entirely via procuring resources from abroad’. State instruments for war financing include taxation and confiscation, debt (domestic and foreign), forced savings, taxation, and monetary policy. Governments must choose to squeeze any or all of the following: current or future taxpayers; bond holders; and those facing shrinking real purchasing power on account of inflation. Zielinski's (2016) analysis points to how the world's two financialised mercantile empires—previously Britain and currently the US—have had far greater leeway in war financing than others. Each could shift the burden to the subjects of their formal or informal imperia and organise global commodity supplies, including food, to their advantage. Indeed, global food regimes were organised accordingly (McMichael, 2009).

The military–industrial complexes of late imperial Britain and Cold War America have been called ‘permanent war economies’ (Edgerton, 1991; Duncan and Coyne, 2013). Tilly's (1993) aphorism could be adapted to encapsulate how, ever since the days of the Dutch and English East India Companies, permanent war makes empire.

States without such means—which is the great majority—run up against harsh limits. Russia could not sustain its war against Japan in 1905 when its creditors called time, whereas Japan was able to sustain its reserves and its credit (Zielinski, 2016, ch. 5). The Second World War of 1939–45 witnessed diverse war financing strategies. The Soviet Union relied on American aid after it entered the war in 1941, but nonetheless its workers starved (Goldman and Filtzer, 2015). Britain's war financing strategy protected home front food security at the cost of forced austerity in India, contributing to the Bengal famine of 1943 (Patnaik, 2017). Anti‐colonial resistance movements, and the quasi‐states that they intermittently forged at the margins of empire, had to finance their wars through a combination of robbing the occupier and, on a larger scale, extracting from the peasantry. Balancing resource generation with local support was the central challenge of guerrilla forces, formalised in Mao Zedong's maxims for how liberation fighters should respect the peasantry (Mao, 2000). In turn, food denial was central to colonial ‘pacification’ (Callwell, 1996) and starvation figured at all points of the imperial cycle. It was used to undermine and punish native polities (Serels, 2013) and was a product of forcible incorporation into the imperial economic realm (Watts, 1983; Davis, 2001; Slobodkin, 2023).

The ending of formal colonial empire was marked by the 1956 Suez Crisis, when Britain, France, and Israel attacked Egypt. Their operation was halted when Washington pulled the financial leash. ‘George Humphrey, Eisenhower's Secretary of the Treasury, smugly noted to American Congressmen in the aftermath of the Suez crisis that the “Brit[ish] government certainly realizes now [that] Britain is no longer a world power able to act without American banking”’ (quoted in Petersen, 2008, p. 216). Britain came dutifully to heel, where it has remained ever since, France grumbled—and a few years later redeemed its dollar reserves for gold—and Israel learned how to control the master. This points to the great divide in the modern world's war economies, which is between the US and its closest clients, which can call on the dollar, and the rest.

Revolutionary regimes find themselves caught in a vice, unable to take the risk of cutting military spending and investments in industrialisation or payouts to elites, instead shifting the hardship to the citizenry. With limited financial tools available, they test the limits of coercion. Garrison socialism has been the calculus of many such regimes. When they succeeded in seizing power, Communists unhesitatingly used extreme coercive methods to secure their position, destroy their class enemies, and transform the means of production. The resources extracted from kulaks, pastoralists, petit bourgeois, and peasants were directed towards building war machines. ‘Class war’ could be literal, such as in the Soviet famines of the 1930s, in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and southern Russia (Graziosi and Sysyn, 2016), and in Mao Zedong's ‘Great Leap Forward’ famine in China and the Khmer Rouge's ‘Year Zero’ in Cambodia. Less extreme variants of coercive extraction include socialist states in post‐colonial Africa, such as Ethiopia under military communism, Guinea after its decision not to join the French monetary system, and Tanzania's Ujamaa project, all of which combined left‐wing militarisation and widespread hunger.

Recently, Ukraine has discovered that it cannot finance its war effort without far‐reaching state intervention (Cooper, 2024), which may yet involve a merciless allocation of hardship. Venezuelans speak of the ‘Maduro diet’ in what has become a criminalised garrison economy (Rendon and Mendales, 2018). A state entirely bereft of financial options was Sudan after 2011, when it lost its oil and had an unsustainable external debt. The government met its bloated military budget through an inflationary spiral that caused unprecedented hunger, including in urban areas (Thomas and de Waal, 2022), ultimately causing its downfall. Meanwhile, the ability of Saudi Arabia and the UAE to pay for expensive militaries and wars, without facing economic hardship, has contributed to their readiness to mount reckless military expeditions in Yemen and elsewhere (Barany, 2021, p. 292).

Where control over violence is dispersed among elite factions, the extraction and allocation of rent operates differently. Armed groups may focus on mining minerals (Le Billon, 2012) or controlling trade (Schouten, 2022). Predatory war economies can become centrally coordinated kleptocracies (Chayes, 2016), warlord insurgencies (Reno, 2011), and ‘rentier political marketplaces’ in which allegiances are freely traded and armed conflict becomes a matter of tactical coalitions for plunder and extortion (de Waal, 2015). Control over the financial institutions of the state has been crucial in the dynamics of the Libyan and Yemeni civil wars (Sarkar, 2022; Eaton, 2023). In all cases, rent follows the gun, and patterns of hunger follow in turn.

3.2. Economic weapons

The second component of a war economy is damaging the enemy. Offensive economic warfare may consist of direct attacks on the adversary's productive base, either through destruction or theft, or both, and indirect attacks through restrictions on the movement of goods, labour, and capital, using blockade and financial restrictions. Maritime powers have long made blockade their preferred weapon (Davis and Engerman, 2008). Although financial and trade sanctions are sometimes presented as an alternative to war, they were developed explicitly as an economic weapon, and former US President Woodrow Wilson famously described them as ‘something more tremendous than war … [a] peaceful, silent and deadly remedy’ (Mulder, 2022, pp. 1–2). From the viewpoint of the Global South, financial rules set in Western capitals veer into instruments of coercion. African and Asian critics note how European and American banks rush to bail out private investors when their foolish speculation threatens bankruptcy, but mercilessly extract painful concessions from debtor nations, and insist that financial disputes are adjudicated in courts in London and New York (Ali, 2023). At the negotiations for the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties in 1968–69, newly decolonised states wanted to expand the definition of ‘coercion’ to invalidate treaties signed under severe economic pressure. This was, needless to say, vetoed by US and European delegations, ‘which argued that “strangling the economy of a country” could not be deemed to rise to the level of coercion contemplated by the U.N. Charter’ (Bâli, 2024, p. 8). Sanctions regimes can certainly be seen as a component of ‘world making’ alongside capitalism itself—indeed, as the regulatory apparatus of neo‐imperial capital (Tzouvala, 2024). Among the goals of those imposing sanctions is also to generate popular discontent and destabilise the national government. It is therefore unsurprising that the targets of sanctions have seen them as acts of aggression that demand a military response, either directly, as in Japan's decision to attack the US Pacific Fleet in 1941 (Miller, 2007), or indirectly, as in Iran's recent sponsorship of proxies (Bajoghli et al., 2024). The weakest starve. Bangladesh's defiance of the US in the early 1970s prompted a merciless cut in assistance and contributed to famine (Crow, 1986). A government's wartime policy to deny resources to an invading enemy can also contribute to famine, as was infamously the case when Britain confiscated or destroyed food stocks and boats in Bengal in 1943 to prevent the Japanese from using them (Mukherjee, 2015).

3.3. Normative orders

The third component of a war economy is that it legitimises the imposition of hardship, including depriving people of the necessities of life. Starvation of enemy civilians has historically been permissible in war (Mulder and van Dijk, 2021). The exigencies of war also justify a government adopting policies that inflict hunger on its own civilians. Such changes in norms are crucial to ‘faminogenesis’.

Empire legitimised and celebrated plunder. Nineteenth century English conquistadors appropriated the Hindi word lūt, meaning ‘spoils of war’, to refer to the riches with which they purchased and decorated their country estates. On a rare instance in which the aim of an imperial expedition was not colonisation, such as Britain's 1868 invasion of Ethiopia to free hostages and punish a recalcitrant potentate, the army was accompanied by a specialist from the British Museum instructed to plunder treasures (Gunning and Challis, 2023). In retreat, empire justified starving insurgents. In the 1950s, France openly instructed its soldiers to make rebellious locations uninhabitable (Trinquier, 1964), and Britain used food denial tactics in Malaya, openly called ‘Operation Starvation’, in a counterinsurgency much praised by the US Army (Sunderland, 1964).

For the peoples subjected to ‘free trade’ at the barrel of the machine gun, the science of economics always followed the dictat of coercion. The paradigmatic case is the ‘Opium Wars’ waged by Britain against China in the nineteenth century. The rationale and the devastation are largely forgotten in the countries that perpetrated these crimes, but not by their victims, whose leaders may rationalise hardship, including hunger, as the price paid for liberation from the colonial yoke.

Most cases of contemporary mass starvation are perpetrated by the contending political and military elites of subaltern polities in the context of war. It is rare for those blocking humanitarian assistance to assert frankly that they want civilians in the opposing camp to starve. More commonly, the responsible authorities deny the existence of famine, by suppressing information or controlling the mechanisms for determining the gravity of food crises (Article 19, 1990). Humanitarian information systems cannot deal with the intentionality element in faminogenic actions (Maxwell, 2022). Insofar as they are perpetrators of mass atrocity, those inflicting starvation also try to legitimise it by dehumanising the people whom they are starving, blaming the hunger on the victims themselves or their political leaders, or by appealing to a higher set of values, including national pride or national survival. They also impute nefarious motives to the humanitarians who seek to assist. Such stratagems are the familiar playbook of atrocity denialism (Cohen, 2001) and are the tribute that the men responsible for man‐made famine pay to universal recognition of the right to food.

4. PAX AMERICANA'S GLOBAL WAR ECONOMY

The era of US‐led globalisation changed the political–economic and normative landscape of war economies. It gave the neo‐imperial power unique capacities for war finance while commensurately limiting the options of all others.

The three decades of the Pax Americana (1986–2015) were a time of unprecedented peace among major powers, rising prosperity, and declining hunger. This concealed the extent to which the American imperium either was organised as a war economy or fashioned the tools for a subsequent weaponisation of economic and financial statecraft. Its astonishing feat was to get most of the countries in the world not only to submit without fighting, but also actually to pay for their own subjugation, surrender control of their economic fate, willingly hand over the instruments of offensive economic warfare, and accept the consequences. Countries did so because there were real benefits, among them cheap food, access to new technology, liberal democracy, and cosmopolitan values. International humanitarian action expanded in budget, reach, and professionalism, underwritten by norms such as the ‘Responsibility to Protect’. All of these contributed to fewer and less lethal famines. But heavy burdens were shifted—among other ways in the form of unpayable debt and unviable peasant farming—political integrity was undermined through militarised kleptocracy, and resistance was engendered. Conditions for a later resurgence in famine were thereby put in place.

4.1. Resourcing the imperium

In the 1980s, the US accelerated and sustained an unprecedented level of spending on its military. It was not only objectively the most expensive, sophisticated, and far‐flung military apparatus in history, but it far outclassed that of any rival. Its cost rose to about 40 per cent of global military expenditure, where it has remained since (O'Hanlon, 2024). It is affordable because the Pentagon's budget has increased more slowly than US gross domestic product (GDP), so that military spending as a proportion of GDP has been on a jagged downward trend.

The US military was active, almost constantly. In the 1990s this took the form of policing, including the spending of a remarkable USD 40 billion annually on sea‐lane policing (Center for Global Development, 2020). After 2001, the main focus was the ‘Global War on Terror’. The map of ‘the coming anarchy’ in the 1990s (Kaplan, 1994) corresponded closely to the Pentagon's ‘arc of instability’ of twenty‐first century terrorist threats and rogue states (Barnett, 2004). Whether through humanitarian intervention or counterterrorism, these troublesome regions of the world were to be dragged into the domain of global capitalism and US security clientship. But in most places and most of the time, American dominance was assured by non‐lethal means. The US established military alliances and defence cooperation agreements, which also doubled as arms sales, on every continent. Most importantly, it had the dollar.

The modern history of US debt war finance derives from the 1960s, when the administrations of Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon financed the unpopular Vietnam War by borrowing (Zielinski, 2016, ch. 3). Only a superpower could do three things at once: pay for the war; sustain domestic consumption; and keep a strong currency. By 1971, Washington found the way to do this, by abandoning the gold standard for floating exchange rates. As the global reserve currency, the US had the privilege of setting the world's interest rate, and attracting capital from abroad both when interest rates were low and when they were high, in times of boom and recession. In the long history of currency regimes alternating between bullion and credit‐based fiat money, this was a historic shift towards the latter (Graeber, 2011). The Treasury did not sell its gold, however (Jabko and Schmidt, 2022), and the US's 1974 agreement with Saudi Arabia to sell oil only in dollars—the so‐called petrodollar—underpinned the currency and the US's power projection with that strategic commodity (Wight, 2021), dashing Global South hopes that the wealth of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) would be redirected to a new economic order (Gauhar, 1987).

Capital inflows financed the US trade deficit and then President Ronald Reagan's administration's arms build‐up in the 1980s. At this point, the dollarisation of state finance across the Global South created the debt crisis. Developing countries had borrowed in dollars and were exposed when the US increased interest rates. This at once bankrupted debtor nations and caused capital flight to the US. The Bretton Woods Institutions (the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank) imposed austerity, dictating that debt rescheduling be conditioned on cutting public spending (Jomo, 2005). The resulting collapse in public revenues pushed leaders, many of them military men, to turn to predation to extract the resources needed to reward their followers, and to the short‐term calculus of political survival at the expense of preserving governance institutions. For poorer African countries, ‘things fell apart’ (Bates, 2008). Within the decade, superpower security rents also disappeared, leaving client regimes desperately shaking down the private sector and plundering the hapless populace (Laitin, 1999). This was the contemporary point of origin of the non‐state war economies of predatory militia and warlordism.

The petrodollar enabled Saudi Arabia to undertake its own war financing, in line with US objectives. In the 1980s, the Saudis agreed to match the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) dollar for dollar in supplying aid to the struggle of the Afghan Mujahideen against the Soviet Union. Saudi bailouts also assisted anti‐communist regimes in Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. However, the Gulf states relied on Britain and the US for military protection, building their own militaries chiefly as vanity projects, for internal repression, and as a means of binding themselves to their foreign guarantors by subsidising the latter's arms industries and political establishments (Barany, 2021).

The biggest spending spike followed President George W. Bush's declaration of a ‘Global War on Terror’ in 2001. The US's expeditionary adventures and spending on weapons and security technology was financed entirely by borrowing (Stiglitz and Bilmes, 2012). Asian US allies bought US bonds—de facto tribute payments to the American imperium. China joined them at a level that tilted the scales of power to one of mutual dependency, where it is unclear who holds the stronger hand.

The late liberal global economic boom was driven by US borrowing and technological innovation alongside China's extraordinarily rapid growth; the two combining to expand global trade and investment at an unprecedented rate. The Global South could, for a while, benefit from this rising tide, drawing on resources from all sides as required. Philip McMichael (2009) identifies three global food regimes: the colonial food regime (1870s–1930s), which fed the British and French empires; the post‐Second World War system (1950s–1970s) that directed surplus American food to stabilise the strategic Cold War perimeters; and the corporate regime from the mid‐1980s that delivered cheap food, but at the cost of laying waste entire systems of livelihood and ecology everywhere in the world where states were unable to enact protective measures. During and after the 2008 global crash, the corporate food regime became financialised (Clapp and Isakson, 2018) and in doing so jettisoned its global security rationale in favour of short‐term returns to investors. The practice of hedging was originally invented to reduce market volatility and lower risks for farmers, but subsequently it became a means to increase the returns to hedge fund managers, which is best done by increasing volatility. In another irony, the capability to do this arises from structural excess production capacity rather than a precarious food system as such (Friedmann, 1982; McMichael, 2009). Fund managers' strategy of bundling commodities together meant that food prices increasingly moved in tandem with other resources, reacting to shifts out of other investments (such as real estate) and price changes for other commodities (such as oil) rather than supply and demand. It followed that a key driver of the food price spikes of 2007–08 and 2010–11 was Wall Street fund managers overreacting to supply changes (brought about by droughts or switches between food crops and biofuels) in a way that showed that they anticipated other similar traders' behaviour far better than they understood agriculture.

Such was the progress in reducing the poverty of the previous decades that the ‘world food crises’ of those years passed without causing widespread famines. The sharp rise in food prices contributed to food riots, including the Arab Spring popular uprisings, but there was only one instance of famine, in Somalia. The increased cost of food imports was one factor among several in that disaster (Maxwell and Majid, 2016, p. 51). The food crisis was, however, on the BRICS agenda from the outset.

4.2. Economic weapons

The unilateral weaponisation of financial tools expanded after 2001. For Washington, control over the switchboard of global electronic financial transfers became a national security matter. The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) is the almost exclusive mechanism for international bank‐to‐bank transactions. It uses dollars and all transactions have a US corresponding bank. This gives the US a second exorbitant privilege. At first, after the events of 11 September 2001 (9/11), the Treasury weaponised its financial instruments to target terrorists and international criminals (Bracken, 2007; Zarate, 2013). Few were opposed to this. When activists campaigning against oil companies investing in southern Sudan, and thereby enabling the Sudanese government's war, called for capital market sanctions on those companies, the US administration resisted. Officials had no difficulty punishing Khartoum but vetoed the exclusion of any company from US stock markets (Energy Intelligence, 2002). Over time, though, Treasury officials' awareness, skills, and appetite to use these weapons increased (Lin, 2016). Having ‘stumbled onto the political power hidden amid the plumbing of this new global economy … [t]he United States sleepwalked its way into a new struggle for empire, breaking bad without ever quite realizing it’, and before long the US Treasury was described as a ‘non‐combatant command’ (Farrell and Newman, 2023, pp. 9 and 60).

American policymakers liked to present targeted financial sanctions as a scalpel rather than a sledgehammer, enabling them to single out bad actors in a manner that minimised collateral damage to broader civilian populations. But the faminogenic capabilities of targeted financial sanctions became clear in Somalia in 2011. The US designated the militant group Harakat al‐Shabaab al‐Mujahideen, known as al‐Shabaab, a terrorist entity, thereby prohibiting any organisation from providing it, deliberately or inadvertently, with material or non‐material assistance. Al‐Shabaab operated throughout southern Somalia and controlled substantial populations. As the indicators for food emergency worsened in late 2010, international relief organisations were unable to provide aid without risking prosecution. The US administration took a hard line on this, conceding a ‘humanitarian carveout’ only when the UN issued a famine declaration, by which time it was too late to stop calamity (Maxwell and Majid, 2016). A different set of financial weapons were used a decade later to confiscate the assets of the Da Afghanistan Bank when the Taliban took power, also contributing to humanitarian crisis (Hoye, 2024; Tzouvala, 2024).

The post‐2001 ‘Global War on Terror’ created a new set of security–military relations with subaltern polities. Terrorism crystallised America's fear that the new enemy was not a rival superpower but a human condition: anarchy. During the 1990s, the US deployed troops in response to humanitarian crises in Somalia, Haiti, and the Balkans. Resistance to its hegemony was limited to irregular militants and paranoid garrison states with nuclear weapons programmes. After 9/11, these threads were drawn together by Thomas Barnett (2004) in his manifesto for how the Department of Defense should be the vanguard for a new world order. Barnett (2004, p. 4) drew ‘The Pentagon's New Map’ of threats which ‘turned out to be overwhelmingly concentrated in the regions of the world that were effectively excluded from globalization's Functioning Core. … These regions constitute globalization's “Non‐Integrating Gap”’ and covered the greater Middle East, Africa, and Central America. Barnett (2004, pp. 40 and 49) overlooked the recent history of how things fell apart in these regions, and saw the US military's mission as leading a collective effort by the ‘Functioning Core’ nations to ‘collectively seek to extend its stable security rule set into the essentially lawless Gap’ to overcome the ‘true enemy … [which] is neither a religion (Islam) nor a place (the Middle East), but a condition—disconnectedness’.

Barnett (2004) drew an accurate map of where the US saw threats, but he mischaracterised them: they were already integrated, through informal markets and illicit financial flows. The US war economy deepened the contradiction with massive military and intelligence patronage payouts (Chayes, 2016). The tension was encapsulated in an exchange at a National Security Council meeting in September 2010 focused on the dilemma of how the US should deal with high‐level corruption in the Afghan government which was undermining the project of building a working state (Coll, 2018, pp. 494–497). Secretary of Defense Robert Gates attacked CIA Director Leon Panetta for having so many Afghan officials on his payroll. Panetta responded: ‘we do it all over the world’. In turn, Gates said: ‘we are the principal source of corruption’. The CIA's business model was buying individuals' loyalty at the going rate—meeting tactical goals at the cost of systemic corruption. The ‘Global War on Terror’ economy turned countries like Afghanistan into transnationally integrated rentier political marketplaces.

4.3. The liberal normative order

The hegemony of the Pax Americana was nonetheless in a period in which the number and lethality of great famines dwindled. Overall, the liberal world order registered an historic world achievement: the prospect of eliminating famines. The fact that this occurred alongside the structural vulnerabilities outlined above is a paradox that demands explanation.

Rising incomes and cheap food was part of this story. But the triggers of famines have commonly been political and military decisions unrelated to these factors. Key to the decline of famines was less permissive conditions for faminogenic acts. Democracy, freedom of the press, and more accountable government are the most powerful elements in making faminogenesis less acceptable (Sen, 2000; Rubin, 2011). The US and Europe were active in democracy promotion. In addition, subaltern states were more sensitive to public opinion in Western countries and at the UN. Following the Rwandan genocide of 1994, the African Union (AU) adopted the principle of ‘non‐indifference’ to ‘grave circumstances’, including war crimes, which would extend to starvation. Another AU principle is the refusal to countenance military coups. Across the world, states signed on to principles such as the ‘Responsibility to Protect’. The international humanitarian system became massively better funded, more professional and better tooled, and more intrusive. President George W. Bush, whose first term (2001–05) marked the zenith of the ambition of the Pax Americana, also committed his administration to the principle of ‘no famine on my watch’, and instructed the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) accordingly. ¹ Civil society organisations grew in number and capability in Africa and, to a lesser extent, in the Middle East. American and European‐based non‐governmental organisations employed an increasing number of staff members from the Global South, individuals who tended to gravitate towards liberal opposition politics in their home countries.

Where Pax Americana crossed the threshold into pushing for regime change, such as in Iraq, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria, the targeted governments were understandably paranoid and ready to discard humanitarian principles in pursuit of regime survival. The same held true for militant Islamist groups holding territory, such as al‐Shabaab in Somalia, the Houthis in Yemen, and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. In all of these cases, the Pax Americana and its enemies were in a fight to the death, with the principal casualties being the civilian populations caught up in the battle. As shown in Table 1, famines were confined to these contested frontiers of the liberalising world.

5. THE BRICS'S POLITICAL ECONOMICS

The BRICS challenge has coincided with the return of famines. This section examines how the war economy lens helps to make sense of this association. The projects of Pax Americana and neoliberal globalisation sparked disquiet across much of the rest of the world. The formation of the BRIC club in 2009 (joined by South Africa a year later) marks the point at which grumbling turned to counter‐organisation. The BRICS project seeks to restore its members' financial sovereignty. Unable to build a global credit order that rivals the dollar, they instead turned to the age‐old alternative foundations for banking: bullion, land, and essential resources. Their challenge creates new environments for proxy conflicts, as well as illiberal politics and counter‐humanitarian normative shifts, which are permissive towards policies that generate starvation.

5.1. Resource mobilisation

The BRICS club was initially an informal group that agreed on the need to reassert financial sovereignty. Its aims include delinking from US stock markets and creating alternative payment systems beyond the reach of the US Treasury. The core BRICS project is currency diversification—also known as de‐dollarisation—but its members do not agree on how far and how fast to go (Liu and Papa, 2022). Historically, any internationally tradeable currency has been underpinned by resources such as gold, land, or oil. Consequently, BRICS states have sought to secure these resources, alongside control of strategic real estate. This has had economic and political ramifications for subaltern polities that include increasing vulnerability to famine.

Having joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, China aimed to reform globalisation. It wanted to counterbalance the dollar without losing the value of its dollar bonds. Russia wants to exit the dollar system altogether. The New Development Bank and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation were the major financial mechanisms. After Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, the G7 (Group of Seven) imposed sanctions, which in turn pushed Russia to make the BRICS more assertive and political, a vehicle for its ‘world majority’ project (Karaganov, Kramarenko, and Trenin, 2023). In 2023, six additional countries were invited to join the BRICS: Argentina (which reversed its decision after the election of President Javier Milei), Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia (which remains undecided in 2024), and the UAE. There is also a wider ‘BRICS‐Plus’ grouping of sympathetic countries. The BRICS challenge is essentially defensive and fought at the margins of the global economy. Yet, while the global economic impact of de‐dollarisation may be small to date, its repercussions for subaltern polities, especially those in the hinterlands of the Red Sea Arena, and in generating famines, are immense.

The expansion of the BRICS into the Middle East marked the advent of a third currency diversification strategy. The Gulf oil states had already understood that their power in the oil market gave them potential to control the dollar rather than being subject to it (Momani, 2008). Within the BRICS club, the UAE and Saudi Arabia are able to ramp up their ‘pro‐active hedging’ strategy, putting one foot in the dollar camp and the other in alternative currency arrangements. The expansion of BRICS also brought a new geographical focus, namely the Red Sea Arena, the world's strategic infrastructure crossroads and also a ‘shatter zone’ of vulnerability to food crises (de Waal, 2024).

Limiting the tyranny of the dollar requires resource mobilisation for national economic security. The main mechanisms for this are strategic commodity encumbrance and, relatedly, strategic infrastructure control. This is inherently disruptive of the US‐led global economic order. In one respect, it is a step backward, to a world in which the intricacies of exchange among diverse currencies are what make trade possible (Guyer, 2016). In another respect, this is the revenge of the real: such soft currencies have a sounder basis in custom (such as gold) and the material resources on which production and consumption are based (such as land, food, and energy), than the magic worked by dollar‐based credit. In the medium term, it will lower transaction costs for trade among non‐G7 countries. In the short term, it threatens to disrupt markets, pass on costs to poorer consumers, and deepen the precarity of livelihoods.

For a decade, BRICS governments have been on a gold buying spree and show no sign of scaling back (Dsouza, 2024). As the financial analyst Zoltan Poszar (2022, p. 3) noted, ‘convertibility to gold beats convertibility to dollars’. Buying gold reserves can be seen as a bet on medium‐term global financial instability and the possibility that a cascade of unplanned de‐dollarisation might actually occur at some point. Buying gold has been the trend since the 2008 financial crisis, including among governments of emerging markets (Arslanalp, Eichengreen, and Simpson‐Bell, 2023). Ultimately, G7 central banks still retain gold reserves for this same reason.

Gold mines are accidents of geography. Burkina Faso, Mali, and Sudan between them produce more than 200 tons of gold annually, almost all from shallow and artisanal mines. This is little more than six per cent of global production but it has disproportionate significance, because the mines are controlled by weak governments or militia forces, and nuggets are easily smuggled. Dubai (UAE) records imports of gold from African countries far in excess of the official exports of those states (Lewis, McNeill, and Shabalala, 2019). Artisanal gold attracted the Russian state mercenary Wagner Group, contributing to armed conflicts and the authoritarian turn across the Sahel and Sudan.

Strategic commodity encumbrance is another strategy for underpinning new currency systems. This is a right to a resource such as a property, which falls short of ownership, that restricts others' use of it. Poszar (2022) argued that what he called the ‘G7‐East’—a group largely coterminous with the BRICS—was strategically seeking encumbrance of key commodities such as oil and critical minerals. Its aim was to price that commodity without being subject to the vagaries of US stock markets.

A major focus of this strategy is land and food. A land rush began before the encumbrance strategy was consolidated. Governments in the Middle East and North Africa were particularly alarmed by how the financialisation of food commodities in 2008–11 led to unpredictable swings in global food prices. The food price spike of late 2010 destabilised states with a tradition of bread price controls and food riots (Woertz, 2012), including Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen.

The G7 and the BRICS club saw the food–politics link in contrasting ways. For the G7, the role of food prices in sparking political instability was an unfortunate outcome of the natural operation of commodity markets. It did little to reform the world food regime to protect vulnerable populations or states, but moved towards neo‐mercantilism to protect domestic producers (Tilzey, 2019). For the BRICS, despite rhetoric about cooperation, the result was a scramble to secure future food systems. Some state investors rushed to purchase agricultural land, especially in Sub‐Saharan Africa and Latin America (Tétreault, Wheeler, and Shepherd, 2012; Cotula, 2013; Sommerville, Essex, and Le Billon, 2014). However, many of these investments were not commercially viable and were abandoned. Some Gulf states, which had been at the forefront of this strategy, shifted towards seeking to own corporations involved in the entire commodity supply chain from farm to table (McSparren et al., 2015; Stoll, 2015). Noting that the BRICS countries produce 42 per cent of the world's cereals and have a similar proportion of its arable land, Russia has proposed a BRICS grain exchange, aiming to manage global food prices (Vorotnikov, 2024).

Other elements of the BRICS strategy focus on oil, including trying to dilute the oil–dollar link by denominating oil transactions in a basket of other currencies (BIS, 2023), and on critical minerals, as well as digital infrastructure and data (Chester, 2012; Miller, 2022). As these are less relevant to faminogenesis at the present time, they are not examined further here.

Strategic infrastructure control is another component. China led the world in promoting infrastructure‐driven growth. At first a different development philosophy to the G7's, it became a strategic challenge too, because real estate in strategic locations is a limited resource, and control over transport corridors and chokepoints not only provides commercial advantages but also security ones. The Belt and Road Initiative is China's monumental investment in global trade infrastructure. Among the new BRICS members, the UAE seeks to be a maritime infrastructure superpower, controlling ports in the western Indian Ocean and Gulf of Aden. This is a joint undertaking between the commercial venture of Dubai Ports World and the political and security ambitions of Abu Dhabi. In turn, the UAE has contracted mercenaries and proxies, and financed vassal states (Ahram and Alaaldin, 2022), contributing to a destabilised outer perimeter of subaltern polities. Its business model is buying loyalties with cash, entrenching corruption.

5.2. The BRICS's economic weapons

The BRICS's intent is reasserting the sovereign entitlements of states (Duggan, 2015; Sakwa, 2019). Tactically, this involves dismantling UN sanctions regimes, striking bilateral trade deals, and finding ways to evade banking transactions that utilise SWIFT. The BRICS club has relatively few offensive economic tools. Against the G7 it has some sabotage options, such as cutting energy supplies, undersea cables, and maritime trade routes, but such is the level of economic interdependence that using these tools inflicts a high cost on the state doing so. Most of the time when the BRICS's offensive economic weapons are employed, it is against one another, such as the sanctions against Qatar imposed by Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

The BRICS's members are fighting wars, and the opportunities for starting them have increased in the past decade, while the international mechanisms for resolving them have diminished. Iran has been engaged in proxy conflicts against the US, Israel, and their allies across the Middle East. It mobilises military alliances through a combination of sectarian and ideological alignment and material patronage, leveraging much greater combat resources than if it were fighting on its own. Russia has used mercenaries in Africa and Syria in addition to its conventional war against Ukraine. The UAE and Saudi Arabia used mercenaries and proxies alongside their own militaries in Yemen, and the former has expanded that to the Horn of Africa. These strategies entrench rentier militarism in subaltern countries. Both states have weaponised hunger in these conflicts.

5.3. The BRICS and food security

The BRICS's members have diverse food security strategies. What they share is that they are not invested in the current international humanitarian system, which, with the exception of Türkiye, remains dominated by the G7. Their concern is with ‘national food sovereignty’ (Kamrava and Babar, 2012). This should not be confused with the ‘food sovereignty’ movement, which is a campaign by local activists for small farmers and local markets to take control of food production and access. The club's starting point on the food agenda was a vision of equitable agricultural development, inspired by Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's commitment to ‘zero hunger’. At the very first BRIC summit in 2009, the leaders issued only two documents: the Joint Statement of the BRIC Leaders; and the BRIC's Joint Statement on Global Food Security. The latter was a development package including ‘sharing the best practices of operating successful public distribution programmes’ (BRICS Information Centre, 2009). Two years later, at the first meeting of the BRICS Agricultural Cooperation Working Group, responsibilities for research and information exchange, protection against the adverse effects of climate change, enhancing technology cooperation and innovation, and promoting trade were allocated among club members. Brazil took responsibility for coordinating the ‘development of a general strategy for ensuring access to food for the most vulnerable population’ (BRICS Information Centre, 2011). This signalled an intent to shift food security systems away from the financialised neoliberal food commodity markets towards more protectionist strategies redolent of the development decades of the 1950s–70s. More recent BRICS agriculture plans have maintained the prior focus on cooperation, development, protection from climate adversities, and trade, losing the focus on reaching the most vulnerable (BRICS, 2021). And the proposed BRICS grain exchange has the potential to stabilise food prices for cereal‐importing low‐ and middle‐income countries.

Ethiopia provides an interesting case of a historically famine‐vulnerable country charting its own path to food security. In the 2000s, the ruling Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) adopted a ‘developmental state’ strategy (Lavers, 2023) and had close party‐to‐party links with China and South Africa. Ethiopia later joined the BRICS partly on account of this record. The EPRDF's national security doctrine was centered on eliminating hunger by allocating rents to productive sectors, seeking to optimise its options by securing infrastructural investment from China, technical expertise from Europe, and US market access (FDRE, 2002). Ethiopia posted remarkable growth rates during 2000–15. When severe drought struck in 2015, the Ethiopian government responded rapidly and at scale, so that widespread crop failures did not lead to asset depletion, distress migration, and mortality (Singh et al., 2016).

In an inversion of the normal rule of success having many parents, an effective famine prevention effort gains little publicity and can become a policy orphan. Western development specialists recognised Ethiopia's success as well as its deviation from their orthodoxies (Dercon, 2022). Nonetheless, Western donors rushed to dismantle Ethiopia's policies as soon as the opportunity arose following the elevation of a self‐proclaimed liberal reformer as prime minister in 2018 (Verhoeven and Woldemariam, 2022). The EPRDF's ‘anti‐famine contract’, based on national security priorities rather than on democratic consensus (de Waal, 2017), did not survive this transition. The food crisis response in 2015, rather than proving a step towards a more effective global regime of famine prevention (Clarke and Dercon, 2016), proved the high‐water mark for those efforts. China might have preferred to keep Ethiopia's developmental project intact, but did not offer public opinions, let alone political engagement, out of respect for national sovereignty.

In summary, the BRICS's members are reconfiguring their economies, in different ways, to respond to what they see as an array of threats. They remain addicted to cheap food and to integration into global markets, trying to maintain food availability and employment. They have the potential for a global food security strategy that is more robust and protective of food entitlements than the neoliberal corporate food regime. But the club's current national economic security strategies, when pursued in a rivalrous manner, either directly destabilise weaker states in the Global South, or at minimum fail to assist those states in escaping the trap of nonviability.

5.4. The politics of indifference

It is the politics that accompanies the BRICS global war economy that is the single greatest risk factor for famine. The BRICS countries are ready to support coup‐makers and autocrats and to push for military solutions to political conflicts.

The BRICS's normative agenda includes rolling back liberal multilateralism, including humanitarian principles, which they see as Western imperialism in disguise. Each member has taken its own approach. Brazil and South Africa have their own histories of politicised, solidarity‐based action against hunger, which have made them sympathetic to international humanitarian goals without uncritical embrace (Vazquez, 2021; Roy, 2023). India had that tradition in its early post‐independence days, but its recent approach to liberal humanitarianism has been at best ambivalent—characterised as ‘norm containment’ (Aneja, 2014). In the early 2010s, China explored becoming a partner in the international humanitarian apparatus (Snetkov and Lanteigne, 2015) and in liberal peacebuilding, with South Sudan as the test case for the latter, which it came to regard as a failure not to be replicated (Large, 2016; Brosig, 2021). Its humanitarian assistance has subsequently become more bilateral and influenced by commercial and reputational issues (Hirono, 2020; Gong, 2021).

Russia, meanwhile, dissented from, and overtly challenged, the Western model. Moscow's longstanding fears, nurtured by the interventions of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Bosnia‐Herzegovina and Kosovo, were confirmed by the way in which France, Britain, and the US used ‘Responsibility to Protect’ as cover for forcible regime change in Libya in 2011. When the US threatened similar action in Syria, Russia first blocked action at the UN Security Council and then provided military assistance to President Bashar al‐Assad's government's war effort that included, among other extreme measures, starvation sieges, invoking the norm of state sovereignty and the right of governments to suppress rebellion (Pieper, 2019; Lewis, 2022). This in turn was a model for Russia's engagement in a swathe of African countries. President Vladimir Putin's doctrine was later summed up as ‘civilizational essentialization, and counter‐norm entrepreneurship’ (Bettiza and Lewis, 2020, p. 560) and its ‘World Majority’ project explicitly rejects universal principles (Karaganov, Kramarenko, and Trenin, 2023, p. 20).

The BRICS club's elevation of sovereignty over human rights is precisely what the AU rejected when it adopted the principle of ‘non‐indifference’ in the aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda (Williams, 2007). The revival of indifference was seen clearly in Syria, where Russia and Iran were involved on one side and Türkiye and Gulf states on the other, and all took a permissive approach to starvation. Achille Mbembe has characterised the ideological cloak for recent African coupmakers as ‘neo‐sovereigntism’ (Juompan‐Yakam, 2023). This shared norm survived Russia's invasion of Ukraine, despite Putin's unabashed appeal to empire and the violation of territorial integrity. The invasion also caused turmoil in the global foodgrains market as Russia blockaded Ukraine's Black Sea ports, with the intention of harming its economy and the side effect of generating food price inflation in ‘world majority’ countries such as Bangladesh, Egypt, and Syria. Remarkably, these disruptions and costs did not provoke rancor that would shatter the BRICS: indeed countries clamoured to join the club.

The Saudi‐led military operation against the Houthis in Yemen was a war of choice, widely regarded as reckless, but nonetheless fully joined by the UAE and backed by the US, Britain, and France. The Gulf kingdoms used starvation as a weapon, testing the Western nations' commitment to humanitarian norms (Buys and Garwood‐Gowers, 2019). Concerned about reputational damage, Saudi Arabia and the UAE insisted that every donation to humanitarian agencies wins plaudits from senior UN officials (United Nations, 2018). This was an augur of the norm revisionism that has since made famine denialism and starvation crimes permissiveness more widespread.

6. SUBALTERN POLITIES' WAR ECONOMIES

Subaltern political economies in Barnett's (2004) ‘non‐integrating gap’ have become more vulnerable to famine. Many failed to reduce structural weaknesses during the late liberal boom and the rise of the BRICS has not overcome that vulnerability, while also leaving them more exposed to conflict‐related triggers.

The liberal imperium left a legacy of vulnerability. In the era of maritime empires, volatility in the global economic order meant that for small open economies, the chances of social cohesion over the longer term were near zero (Guyer, 2004). These dismal prospects were partly hidden in the early post‐colonial years. Countries where ‘things fell apart’ in the 1980s (Bates, 2008) were reconstituted, not as institutionalised states, but as rentier political marketplaces (de Waal, 2015) in which rulers survived through their skills in appropriating and allocating rents for the overriding purpose of staying in power. Within this category are a number of ‘rogue’ states targeted for regime change by the US, which were prepared to go to any lengths to stay in power, including mass starvation.

‘Political marketplace’ countries share several features (de Waal, 2015, p. 19). First, political finance, meaning the funds that political actors use to buy loyalty or political services, is in the hands of individuals who have political, military, or economic interests distinct from the state. Second, control over the means of coercion is dispersed or contested. Third, political disputes are not resolved by formal institutions and procedures. In several of these countries, the CIA's business model ensured that specialists in violence were integrated into international financial circuits.

There is no clear exit route from this predicament. The combination of cheap food, the allure of Western market access, and borrowing for infrastructure, led these countries into economic crisis when the tide of liberal globalisation turned. Unable to meet the pace‐setting rates of return set by US capital markets, not able to climb the lower rungs of the economic development ladder on account of competition from newly‐industrialised Asian producers, stuck on a demographic escalator that demanded a fast expansion in jobs and services, and facing a new debt crisis, many countries simply do not see a road ahead to development. In these circumstances, rulers cannot satisfy the demands of electorates and cannot achieve legitimacy through delivery. Politicians can only focus on manoevering to stay in power, through populist messaging, coercion, and staying on top of a system in apparently perpetual turmoil.

Another critical factor is strategic geography and the security rentierism it draws, including from the BRICS. Several of the countries most vulnerable to famine today possess gold, strategic minerals, or expanses of farmland and hence garner the attention of the BRICS. Some are strategically located on the geographic faultlines of global and regional power struggles. Yemen and the Horn of Africa are among these, along with Afghanistan, Palestine, and Syria. Rulers, aspiring rulers, leaders of breakaway territories, and other political brokers attract cash payments and weapons from rivalrous patrons. Russia, China, and the middle powers of the Middle East, including Iran, Israel, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, all have their own versions of the CIA's business model, and their competitive bidding has turned the Red Sea Arena into a marketplace of loyalties.

Furthermore, it is notable that the countries that head the list of ‘political marketplaces’ are those that are also deepest in humanitarian emergency (Sarkar et al., 2021). As well as the Horn of Africa and the Sahel, the conjoined catalogue includes Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Syria, and Yemen. These kinds of political systems are terribly bad at producing public goods such as food security, which are entirely secondary to tactical political needs. In addition, as strategic rivalries intensify, the cost of conducting politics and the market price of loyalty rises, so that the funds required for staying in power squeezes out public budgets (de Waal, 2015). Humanitarian operations in these environments are also difficult with the constant risk that relief commodities and operators become sucked into the logic of rentier political markets.

7. CONCLUSION

The war economy lens helps us to make sense of the decline and return of famines. It integrates structural and proximate causes, economics and politics, and the global and the local. It explains key elements in the current vulnerabilities to conflict and food insecurity and varying levels of tolerance of faminogenic policies.

For three decades of liberal imperium, coercion was focused on the disordered or defiant frontierlands of the new world order. Like the great power peace of 1815–1914, the Pax Americana rested on political and economic institutions undergirded by ideological assumptions that seemed beyond question, but which generated their own countermovement by those who saw the evisceration of their autonomy (cf. Polanyi, 2001). That challenge has duly arrived. As with the unravelling of the early twentieth century system, the driver is the force majeure of capital hand‐in‐hand with lawmaking, and the proximate cause of the conflict is the monetary system—then, the gold standard, today, the US dollar.

The contours of vulnerability to famine across the world now were established during the decades of liberal globalisation and American efforts to pacify ‘non‐integrating gap’ regions under US hegemony. Economic orders based on credit money predominate in times of social peace and widespread confidence in stability; bullion‐ and commodity‐based orders in times of conflict (cf. Graeber, 2011, p. 213). The political economy of the Pax Americana spawned anxieties at home and systemic resistance abroad, with the BRICS project, now taking the form of hedging on de‐dollarisation, being the most important challenge. The extraction of resources necessary to support alternative currency options, along with the contest focused on the globally strategic real estate of the Red Sea Arena, have imposed economic pressures on certain countries in the Global South and consolidated subaltern war economies. This is felt particularly acutely in the new BRICS members' near abroad, namely, Yemen and the Horn of Africa.

Western nations are also adopting many of the same methods and norms as the BRICS.

This is both cause and effect of the populist surge. It has led to economic decoupling and hostility towards immigration. Aid budgets have shrunk, including humanitarian assistance, so that responses to food emergencies occur at a higher threshold of distress—what the World Food Programme has called the ‘humanitarian doom loop’ (United Nations, 2023). Both the plutocratic and populist wings of the Donald Trump‐led Republican Party have made clear their intent to weaponise the US dollar, alongside trade and aid instruments, including humanitarian assistance, in a transactional manner and emasculate multilateral organisations (Primorac, 2023; Walton, Moore, and Burton, 2023).

The US and European response to Israel's ongoing campaign in Gaza sharply illustrates how realpolitik overrules humanitarian principles. Israeli justifications for attacks on hospitals echo those of Syria and Russia a few years earlier (Gordon, 2021, 2024; Schmitt, 2023). International humanitarian law exceptions that permit the targeting of medical facilities on the grounds of military necessity are becoming the rule. A similar logic applies to starvation crimes. Rather than holding Israel to the higher standards for prohibiting starvation recently championed, such as in UN Security Council Resolution 2417 of 2018, the US and Western European governments have instead adopted a reading of international law more favourable to Israel, and hence more permissive of creating starvation not only in Gaza but elsewhere. If this is indeed the new consensus, the most vulnerable are set to become victims in yet another turn of the global war economy.

de Waal, A. (2025). Hunger in global war economies: understanding the decline and return of famines. Disasters, 49(1), e12661. 10.1111/disa.12661