This Friedman Seminar features Daniel Maxwell, professor, Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, and acting director, Feinstein International Center, presenting “The 2011 Famine in Somalia: Beyond a Food Security Crisis." Abstract This presentation will be based on Professor Maxwell’s retrospective research on the 2011 famine in South Central Somalia, that resulted in the recent book, Famine in Somalia: Competing Imperatives, Collective Failures (Oxford University Press, 2016). The presentation will trace the causes and consequences of the food security, malnutrition and mortality crisis, but then address the complicating factors that made this such a deadly crisis. Some 258,000 people lost their lives in the famine, and hundreds of thousands more were displaced or had their livelihoods severely disrupted. These complications include the history and political economy of three-plus decades of continuous humanitarian assistance in Southern Somalia, the rule of Al Shabaab and the war between Al Shabaab and the fledgling Somali Transitional Federal Government, its Africa Union partners, and expeditionary forces from Kenya and Ethiopia, donor counter terrorism policies that put a significant constraint on external humanitarian assistance, the engagement of non-western humanitarian actors, the role of the diaspora and urban-based lineage and kin groups in responding to the crisis, and the way in which internal social dynamics shaped both the crisis itself and brutal abuses that people faced when displaced. Bio Daniel Maxwell is a Professor and the Acting Director of the Feinstein International Center at Tufts’ Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy. He leads the research program on food security and livelihoods in complex emergencies. He served as the Chair of the Department of Food and Nutrition Policy at the Friedman School from 2008 to 2011. Through his research, Dan works with governments, agencies, and affected communities to build the evidence base for improved humanitarian and resilience programming and policy. He recently published Famine in Somalia: Competing Imperatives, Collective Failures (Oxford University Press, 2016) with Nisar Majid. He is the co-author, with Chris Barrett of Cornell University, of Food Aid After Fifty Years: Recasting Its Role (Routledge, 2005), and co-author with Peter Walker, of Shaping the Humanitarian World (Routledge, 2009). Prior to academia, Dan spent twenty years in leadership positions with international NGOs and research institutes. He was Deputy Regional Director for CARE International in Eastern and Central Africa, Rockefeller Post-Doctoral Fellow the International Food Policy Research Institute, and worked for Mennonite Central Committee for ten years in Tanzania and Uganda. He holds a B.Sc. from Wilmington College, a Master’s degree from Cornell, and a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. About the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy: The Gerald J. and Dorothy R. Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University is the only independent school of nutrition in the United States. The school's eight degree programs – which focus on questions relating to nutrition and chronic diseases, molecular nutrition, agriculture and sustainability, food security, humanitarian assistance, public health nutrition, and food policy and economics – are renowned for the application of scientific research to national and international policy.