Feeding the hungry: Advocacy and blame in the global fight against hunger Michelle Jurkovich Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 2020.

• Published date: 01 December 2022
• Author: Andrea Boggio
• Date: 01 December 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/wmh3.494

DOI: 10.1002/wmh3.494

BOOK REVIEW

Feeding the hungry: Advocacy and blame in

the global fight against hunger

Michelle Jurkovich

Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 2020.

Virginia Woolf famously wrote that “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has

not dined well.”Yet, an estimated 25,000 people, including more than 10,000 children, die

from hunger and related causes daily. How is it possible to improve the last century's

economic, social, and cultural life of some many, so little progress has been made in fighting

chronic hunger? This question is at the heart of Feeding the Hungry: Advocacy and Blame

in the Global Fight Against Hunger, by Michelle Jurkovich, a political scientist at the

University of Massachusetts Boston whose international relations work focuses on, among

other things, the human right to food and food security.

As the title suggests, the book's primary focus is understanding how international non-

governmental organizations (INGOs) and large charities have advocated the end of hunger

in the past half a century. The core empirical finding is that campaigns to end chronic hunger

have not been framed around human rights. Why has this been the case? With this core

finding and question as points of departure, Jurkovich's analysis investigates and assesses

the advocacy strategies of key NGOs in this field. Chapter 1 looks at the history of

international anti‐hunger campaigns, discussing the increasing role of INGOs and the

human rights framework.

Chapter 2 places these developments in the context of international relations theory,

exploring how two models of human rights advocacy apply to her case study. According to

the author, these models—the spiral model and the boomerang model—fail to be beneficial

to NGOs in shaping their advocacy agenda and narratives around the right to food. The

shortcoming of the two models is that they assume a “common, unitary target,”typically a

government, of human rights violations. In the case of food, though, single‐target models are

inadequate because other actors, particularly transnational corporations, play a crucial role

in food systems, and arguably many of the human rights violations could be imputed to

them rather than national governments. Jurkovich proposes the “buckshot”model as the

alternative, more effective model to organize human rights advocacy targeting multiple

actors. This model theorizes advocacy efforts with multiple targets, involving multiple states

and potential alliances or coalitions among INGOs.

As a human rights scholar and advocate, I found the analysis of these theoretical models

not very appealing. International relations scholars may be interested in the new model (the

buckshot model) proposed by Jurkovich. However, I found these models too abstract and

not very useful in capturing the complexity of advocacy, mainly when the issue to be tackled

(chronic hunger) is complex, intersectoral, and fraught with conflicts of interest of the various

stakeholders, including the INGOs profiled in the book. Chapter 3 focuses on the empirical

question of whether the human right to food is a source of norms around hunger. Norms are

defined as socially shared believes in the appropriateness of a behavior (p. 112). The author

World Med. & Health Policy. 2022;14:812–814.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/wmh3812

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