The Ukrainian famine or ‘Holodomor’ of 1932–1933 claimed the lives of an estimated 4 to 4.5 million people. General consensus has it that the famines that swept the Soviet Union were caused largely...Show moreThe Ukrainian famine or ‘Holodomor’ of 1932–1933 claimed the lives of an estimated 4 to 4.5 million people. General consensus has it that the famines that swept the Soviet Union were caused largely by the collectivisation drive of the First Five-Year Plan, after which the situation in Ukraine was exacerbated by Stalin’s policies in the winter of 1932–1933. However, the underlying motives for Stalin’s actions with regard to Ukraine remain a matter of lively debate. Combining the existing literature on the initiation of mass indiscriminate violence in general and on the causes of the Holodomor in particular with novel insights from studies on authoritarian politics, I posit that the Ukrainian famine may have been intentionally aggravated because the Ukrainian leadership was considered a liability to Stalin’s rule. Rather than facing these elites head on, I suggest that Stalin weaponised the famine as a means of mass indiscriminate violence to enable the capture of local institutions and to undermine the individual support bases of his potential rivals. In this way the Ukrainian Communist Party was purged from the bottom to the top, culminating with the executions of Stanislav Kosior and Vlas Chubar and the expulsion of Grigory Petrovsky, as well as the executions of Pavel Postyshev and Vsevolod Balytsky during the Great Purges of 1937–1939.Show less
The thesis looks at how the pre-famine conditions in the Yemen civil war are being portraied through photography in late 2018, early 2019 and, at its core, discusses the lack of systematic,...Show moreThe thesis looks at how the pre-famine conditions in the Yemen civil war are being portraied through photography in late 2018, early 2019 and, at its core, discusses the lack of systematic, institutionalised ethic regulations in humanitarian photography and its impact on the future of understanding humanitarian tragedies. It explores three different ways of photographic representation that all aim for charity as main purpose: case oriented, illustrative human rights photography (Doctors Without Borders), dehumanising and objectifying tendencies of mass media photography spectacles (New York Times) and the inbetween, using sequential narratives to generate context (United Nations Crisis Relief/UNOCHA). The following discussion explores the use of photography as visual spectacle rather than portraying human beings in a context that grounds them as human beings. This bases in the recent discourses of visual global politics (Bleiker, Hutchinson, Chouliaraki, Robinson, Pruce et al.). At last, it expands the discussion towards modern means of visual media (sequential photography, video, virtual reality, augmented reality, 4d)and explores the vast possibilities of integrating alternative media formats in humanitarian causes as well as its possible dangers that 'do-good' humanism can cause for humanitarian organisations in the long run.Show less
