Book

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Politics of Hunger: 

The Great Ukrainian Famine and the Struggle for Recognition, 1932-2022.

Politics of Hunger examines how societies confront catastrophic events—famines, epidemics, and environmental catastrophes—not only as natural disasters, but as deeply political and cultural challenges. By developing a global historical and critical sociological framework, this book challenges the marginalization of such catastrophes in social theory and public memory. Through an in-depth case study of the Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933 (the Holodomor), which claimed more than 3.9 million lives, the book explores how hunger is remembered, denied, politicized, and mobilized across decades and borders. 

My book seeks to rethink how sociologists conceptualize “events,” violence, and suffering. It demonstrates that recognition of famine as political violence is not a simple passage from denial to acknowledgment but an ongoing process of contestations when some narratives prevail over others depending on the available resources, cultural schemes, geopolitical climate, and the positionality of the actors who claim power over knowledge. While the twentieth century witnessed some of the deadliest famines in history, sociological theory has largely ignored them or treated them as background to political change rather than central political and cultural events in their own right. Moreover, malnourished, poor, and deprived people frequently escape social recognition as victims of political violence. 

As I hope my book will demonstrate, the struggles around famine memorializations, silences surrounding famine-inflicted trauma, and political contests behind famine recognitions expose global hierarchies embedded in questions of what counts as violence, whose suffering is recognized, and whose lives should be commemorated.