Paper short abstract:

The paper seeks to explain how the cultural heritage of experiencing hunger and extreme food scarcity caused by famines along with the processes of political separation in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Northern Ireland established the importance of hunger symbolism and hungerstriking practices for the conflicts around state independence on the political peripheries of Europe.

Paper long abstract:

Using the comparative approach I will be explaining how the cultural memories and practices that emerged during the extreme food scarcity periods and experience of hunger along with the of political separation in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Northern Ireland brought to life the contemporary practices of hunger-striking for political purposes. Many cultural practices that allowed those nations to survive man-made famines have simultaneously allowed to collect important knowledge and created strategies that helped to build a modern nation state. This is visible on the peripheries of Europe where the hunger rhetoric is especially persuasive influencing both: the human imagination and state building processes. This way hunger symbolism legitimizes and raises the importance of adopted political strategies and supports the anti-colonial and liberation movements.

Thus, I am going to argue that the cultural heritage of Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Northern Ireland is strongly based on the hunger symbolism which funded the major ideologies of new nation states and supported the anti-colonial and liberation movements. Extreme food scarcity is considered here, from the point of view of ‘new famine thinking’, as failure of accountability. In this approach the politicization of famine is the central point: "famines are related to political regimes. Most twentieth-century famines occurred under authoritarian, unaccountable regimes, colonial administrations, military dictatorship, and one-party states, or during wartime" (Bne Saad, The Global Hunger Crisis, 2013:61).