Tom Dannenbaum: “Siege Starvation: A War Crime of Societal Torture”

Northeastern Law’s Center for Global Law and Justice 2024 Speaker Series, Issues in Human Rights and Humanitarian Law

Featuring:
Tom Dannenbaum
Associate Professor of International Law, The Fletcher School, Tufts University

Siege Starvation: A War Crime of Societal Torture

Abstract:
Starvation in war is resurgent. Recently or currently, it has devastated populations in Ethiopia, Palestine, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, Yemen and elsewhere. The practice has also drawn the scrutiny of the United Nations Security Council. And yet, what precisely is criminally wrongful about starvation methods remains underspecified. A common way of thinking about the criminal wrong is as a form of killing or harming civilians. Although its differentiating particularities matter, the basic wrongfulness of the crime inheres, on this view, in it being an attack on those who ought not be attacked. For some, this supports a broad interpretation of the starvation ban. However, for others, the graduality of starvation preserves the continuous possibility of the avoidance or minimization of civilian death or harm in a way that direct kinetic attacks do not. In combination with the method’s purported military utility, this incrementalism has underpinned arguments for the permissibility of certain forms of siege and other deprivation and a narrow interpretation of the starvation crime. Drawing on the moral philosophy of torture, Tom Dannenbaum rebuts these arguments and offers a distinctive normative theory of the crime. Starvation, like torture, is peculiarly wrongful in its distortion of victims’ biological imperatives against their capacities to formulate and act on higher-order desires, political commitments, and even love. This process does not merely raise the cost of fulfilling those commitments. Instead, starvation tears gradually at the very capacity of those affected to prioritize their most fundamental commitments, regardless of whether they would choose to do so under the conditions in which choice is a coherent concept. Rather than palliating, the slowness of starvation methods is at the crux of this torturous wrong. Recognizing this redefines the meaning and place of the crime in the framework of international criminal law.

Northeastern Respondent:
Denise Garcia
Professor of Political Science and International Affairs

Questions? 
Please contact Professor Zinaida Miller at z.miller@northeastern.edu.

The lecture series is open to the Northeastern University community and the general public.