The Politics of Chronic Hunger

This chapter focuses on one case of an economic and social right, the right to food. It mentions the development of an alternative model of advocacy, called the buckshot model, which explains the trajectories of campaigns in terms of the right to food. It also discusses international anti-hunger activism, which cites the fore advocacy surrounding the human right to food. The chapter emphasizes how the fulfillment of other human rights is either impossible or substantively meaningless without the realization of the right to food. It points out that more people die from hunger and related causes globally than in all wars, civil and international, combined.

How to Think about Advocacy

This chapter focuses on contemporary international anti-hunger advocacy, which describes the nature of contemporary campaigns across top international anti-hunger organizations. It introduces dominant human rights models, namely Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink's “boomerang model” and Thomas Risse, Stephen C. Ropp, and Kathryn Sikkink's “spiral model.” It also provides an alternative model of advocacy, the “buckshot model,” which describes and explains advocacy around hunger and the right to food. The chapter identifies the hidden assumptions behind dominant human rights models and explores their limitations by using the hunger case to set up a contrast with more-often-studied civil and political rights campaigns. It reviews interviews with international anti-hunger activists that were completed by 2015, which reflected contemporary campaigns and efforts until 2014.

The Limits of Law

This chapter considers the puzzling role of international law around the right to food and examines why the existing law has been unable to generate norms within the advocacy community. It explores the reasons why international anti-hunger organizations rarely legitimate the right to food in legal terms and how this case can challenge the understanding of the relationships between norms, human rights, and law. It also provides a conceptual discussion of the distinction between formal law and norms, underscoring the importance of not conflating the two concepts. The chapter argues that many international anti-hunger organizations still do not conceptualize food as a human right, making international human rights law less relevant. It looks at the hunger case that suggests there is nothing automatic about law generating norms among activists or society at large.

Not All Human Rights Have Norms

This chapter builds on the insight of the international anti-hunger advocacy that does not fit the expectations of dominant models. It explains how it is possible that the behavior of international anti-hunger advocacy varies from the expectations of the human rights and advocacy literatures. It also evaluates the normative environment in which international anti-hunger advocates work. The chapter argues that there is no norm around hunger or the right to food among top international anti-hunger organizations and theorizes an advocacy in issue areas that lack a norm. It provides additional conceptual tools to make sense of the social and moral environments in which activists are working, articulating the distinction between norms, moral principles, and supererogatory standards.

Putting Hunger on the Agenda

This chapter examines how hunger evolved from a condition that is understood as an inevitable part of the natural landscape to a problem that is seen as something to be ameliorated. It sets the stage for the emergence of the contemporary international anti-hunger organizations and explores the origins of a human right to food in international law. It also serves to document how responding to global hunger was put on the political agenda as a problem to be solved. The chapter identifies key changes in how the international community has addressed the problem on hunger and highlights the essentials to understanding the contemporary international anti-hunger advocacy. It looks at archival research conducted at the archives of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in Rome, as well as at the UK and U.S. National Archives.

Hunger at the Nexus of Rights and Development

This chapter explains why there is no anti-hunger norm and why some rights may struggle to generate norms. It considers what constitutes a human right and how issues that sit at the nexus of development and human rights struggle to develop socially shared expectations of appropriate behavior by specific actors. It also 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 chapter elaborates how human rights meets development nexus, which can be challenging to navigate as development and human rights frameworks understand responsibility for hunger amelioration in different ways. It discusses food as a human right that is codified in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and seen as one of the world's greatest development problems.

Policy Implications and the Road Ahead

This chapter examines international advocacy around hunger and the right to food, which provided a new analytical model to describe and explain this area. It explores how it is possible that international anti-hunger advocacy would behave differently from human rights advocacy and mentions international anti-hunger activists that are working in an environment without a norm around hunger. It also describes hunger's placement between two different analytic frameworks, development and rights. The chapter discusses the international anti-hunger organizations with in-country operations, which has strong incentives not to blame national governments for fear of jeopardizing the safety and security of staff and active programs. It reviews the study of international anti-hunger advocacy that has important theoretical implications for how norms, human rights, and law are understood.