Crisis in 'a normal bad year': spaces of humanitarian emergency, the IPC scale and the Somali famine of 2011 (original) (raw)

This article takes the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) scale and its use in the declaration of famine in Somalia in July 2011 as a site for examining how the spatial imaginary and emplaced, affective registers of emergency are implicated in marking situations as spaces of humanitarian emergency, or not. The IPC scale is described and its role in removing the affective registers of crisis discussed in relation to the normalisation of the conditions constituting a classification of IPC Phase 4, ‘Humanitarian Emergency’, in Somalia. This is contrasted to the urgent mobilisation of humanitarian action following the reclassification of Somalia’s food insecurity situation to IPC Phase 5, ‘Famine’. It is argued that the IPC phase reclassification, by enacting a moment of rupture, led the normalised space of food insecurity to be seen as a space of humanitarian emergency, thereby triggering the rapid mobilisation of humanitarian action in response to crisis.