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Food insecurity poses one of the most pressing development and human security challenges in the world. In Feeding the Hungry , Michelle Jurkovich examines the social and normative environments in which international anti-hunger organizations are working and argues that despite international law ascribing responsibility to national governments to ensure the right to food of their citizens, there is no shared social consensus on who ought to do what to solve the hunger problem. Drawing on interviews with staff at top international anti-hunger organizations as well as archival research at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the UK National Archives, and the U.S. National Archives, Jurkovich provides a new analytic model of transnational advocacy. In investigating advocacy around a critical economic and social right-the right to food-Jurkovich challenges existing understandings of the relationships among human rights, norms, and laws. Most important, Feeding the Hungry provides an expanded conceptual tool kit with which we can examine and understand the social and moral forces at play in rights advocacy.

Food insecurity poses one of the most pressing development and human security challenges in the world. In Feeding the Hungry, Michelle Jurkovich examines the social and normative environments in which international anti-hunger organizations are working and argues that despite international law ascribing responsibility to national governments to ensure the right to food of their citizens, there is no shared social consensus on who ought to do what to solve the hunger problem. Drawing on interviews with staff at top international anti-hunger organizations as well as archival research at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the UK National Archives, and the U.S. National Archives, Jurkovich provides a new analytic model of transnational advocacy. In investigating advocacy around a critical economic and social right—the right to food—Jurkovich challenges existing understandings of the relationships among human rights, norms, and laws. Most important, Feeding the Hungry provides an expanded conceptual tool kit with which we can examine and understand the social and moral forces at play in rights advocacy.

Inclusive participation by all states is now taken for granted in many global governance efforts, but this was not always the normal practice. Nineteenth-century multilateralism, embedded in a world of \"great powers,\" actively rejected broad participation, valuing small numbers, hierarchy, and status in coordinating action. Construction of broader participation norms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a joint project that owes much to innovations in the Americas and regional norms developed within that group as it organized meetings among the American states. Central to these norms was sovereign equality that, in the American context, entailed universal participation of all American states and voting on a one state—one vote basis at conferences. This article traces the spread of these norms from the Americas to the Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907, and highlights the varied sources for many of our contemporary multilateral practices in these early events.

How do citizens understand the drivers of revolutionary mobilization? Studies of revolution and contentious politics often focus on expressed grievances at the moment of protest in order to theorize the causes of mobilization. Yet citizens’ retrospective understandings of their country’s revolution may hold important implications for post-revolutionary politics. We argue that citizens in the aftermath of revolution may well hold divergent views about the main drivers of mass mobilization, and that these divergent views often map on to important social and political cleavages. Using an original nationally representative survey conducted in 2017, we analyze retrospective accounts of the socio-economic grievances underpinning the 2010/2011 Tunisian revolution, focusing on which socio-economic grievances Tunisians perceived as most important in driving revolutionary protests. We find the most significant variation at the regional level. We draw on existing scholarship on regional disparities to contextualize these findings. In interior governorates, where spontaneous anti-regime mobilization began in December 2010, citizens overwhelmingly identified unemployment as the key revolutionary grievance. In the capital and coastal regions, where mass protests emerged later in the revolutionary cycle and included a broader range of formal civil society actors, including powerful labor syndicates, citizens identified a wider array of grievances, including inadequate wages and lack of adequate access to healthcare. Beyond revolutionary contention, this article’s focus on retrospective grievances can serve to illuminate broader dynamics of contentious politics, particularly how important episodes of contentious politics are conceived years after they took place and how those conceptions might differ along politically or geographically salient cleavages in society.

Descriptive research—work aimed at answering “who,” “what,” “when,” “where,” and “how” questions—is vital at every stage of social scientific inquiry. The creative and analytic process of description—through concepts, measures, or cases, whether in numeric or narrative form—is crucial for conducting research aimed at understanding politics in action. Yet, our field tends to devalue such work as “merely descriptive” (Gerring 2012), subsidiary to or less valuable than hypothesis-drive causal inference. This article posits four key areas in which description contributes to political science: in conceptualization, in policy relevance, in the management and leveraging of data, and in challenging entrenched biases and diversifying our field.

The right to food has been codified in international law in several legally binding covenants and conventions, beginning with the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), which was adopted in 1966 and entered into force in 1976, though the right to food was included earlier in the legally nonbinding Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). It has since been recognized in numerous other international conventions and agreements, such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), as well as in 2004

What is the shape of contemporary international anti-hunger advocacy? Can our dominant human rights models make sense of advocacy in this important issue area? While chapter 1 served to provide necessary historical context concerning how responsibility for hunger has been understood in the past, this chapter turns its focus to contemporary international anti-hunger advocacy. Its first objective is to describe in broad strokes the shape of some contemporary international anti-hunger campaigns (for which greater empirical detail is provided in chapter 4). Holding up these examples to the theoretical expectations of dominant models in the human rights literature, I argue that

This book has examined international advocacy around hunger and the right to food, provided a new analytical model to describe and explain this area and explored how it is possible that international anti-hunger advocacy would behave differently from human rights advocacy already documented in the literature. International anti-hunger activists are working in an environment without a norm around hunger. This lack of a norm is not only constitutive of the diffusion of blame around chronic hunger but also makes less possible certain campaign behavior (namely, the centralized pressure on one target actor we have come to expect in the transnational

If norms matter in explaining the shape and nature of advocacy around human rights, and not all human rights have norms (as argued in chapters 2 and 3), the pressing question that follows is why some rights may struggle to generate norms. In the hunger case, specifically, what are the challenges to norm development? This chapter argues that one of the most significant obstacles to the development of an anti-hunger norm is the issue’s placement at the nexus of development and human rights frameworks. The human rights meets development nexus can be especially challenging to navigate as development and human

Hunger has always been a condition of humankind. It has only comparatively recently become a problem and more recently still a violation of a human right. For much of human history, hunger was understood as an inevitable feature of the natural landscape.¹ It was an expected outcome of a growing population where simple science, mathematics, and logic determined it was simply impossible to feed everyone.² In this sense, one would no more lament the ubiquity of hunger in the world than one would lament death itself. Hunger was simply unavoidable. Not only was hunger not a problem for which societies