DECEMBER 2024
Starvation Crimes and
International Law
A New Era
By Chase Sova
F
ollowing a period of relative post-Cold War peace, the beginning of the twenty-rst century has
seen a tremendous increase in the number of conict events around the planet. As of late 2024,
the Council on Foreign Relations was tracking 27 ongoing global crises, from general political
instability to interstate war. Prior to 2024, international relations scholars would have stated with
certainty that the nature of conict was also changing: Conict between countries was on the decline
and conict within countries was increasing. This was evident by the rise of non-state actor groups in
places like Syria and Yemen and the reestablishment of violent extremists like Boko Haram, Al-Shabab,
and ISIS in the African Sahel.
But with Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, a violent ground war in Gaza that has spilled over into
regional conict, Azerbaijan’s attacks on Armenia over the contested Nagorno-Karabakh territory,
and China’s increasingly bellicose posturing toward Taiwan, it is clear that the world is entering into
a new era of great power competition that threatens to destabilize the post–World War II global order.
As theorists seek to provide the best taxonomy for this new era, there is one unescapable truth of its
arrival: Hunger will continue to rise in a world in transition.
It should be no surprise that for more than a decade a mantra has sounded interminably across an
overburdened and underfunded humanitarian sector: We cannot end hunger without rst ending war.
Indeed, most food security experts and leaders believe that Sustainable Development Goal 2, ending
hunger by 2030, is wholly unachievable in a world rife with conict. Conict is the single largest driver
of hunger today, eclipsing both climate-related extreme events and economic malaise (both of which
are also on the rise). In a 2022 report, the UN World Food Programme—the world’s largest humanitarian
organization ghting hunger—noted that a full 80 percent of its budget went to countries ghting
themselves or others.
