Food insecurity poses one of the world's most pressing development and human security challenges. In Feeding the Hungry, Michelle Jurkovich examines the social and normative environment 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, the hunger issue area lacks a 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 United States and United Kingdom 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 toolkit with which we can examine and understand the social and moral forces at play in rights advocacy.
--Charli Carpenter, University of Massachusetts, author of Lost Causes