Over the last thirty years, impressive progress was made in research on food security and famine relief, indeed, on all aspects of humanitarianism. And yet a quarter of a million people are estimated to have died in the famine in Somalia between 2011 and 2012. Daniel Maxwell and Nisar Majid, both of Tufts University, ask how this happened and how to minimize the risks of future tragedies on this scale, so that we do not have to accept that humanitarian action is, in Fiona Terry's words, ‘condemned to repeat’ its mistakes.

Their study draws on what they modestly call an ‘eclectic mix’ of approaches: a thorough literature review; interviews conducted by a research team with 400 interlocutors in the most famine-stricken areas, in person and by telephone, some of which are transcribed here to great effect; interviews with key members of the ‘humanitarian community’; reanalysis of quantitative data from all accessible sources; and, extensive workshops and outreach sessions. The resulting book sets a high standard for future retrospective analyses of major disasters and endeavours to avert and alleviate them. For example, it describes some relatively successful initiatives such as the cash transfer and voucher programmes, which enabled people to obtain food via markets.

It has long been established that there is no such thing as a ‘natural’, that is to say politics-free, disaster, but there was a meteorological substrate, the El Niño Southern Oscillation, that made possible predictions of drought in the Horn of Africa. Actual failure of rains was reported over six months before famine in South Central Somalia was declared by the United Nations in July 2011. The technical definition of famine is based on objective criteria: death rate; the prevalence of acute malnutrition in children; and, more than 20 per cent of households having no access to food. Maxwell and Majid propose that an alternative ‘emic’ criterion for famine might be when people begin to get phone calls asking for help from individuals whom they do not actually know. At earlier stages, people in need will call first on immediate kin (including the extensive Somali diaspora) and secondly on wider clan and community networks. Social connectedness is one of the ‘coping strategies’ used by afflicted populations that today's humanitarians are concerned to understand – others include diversification of risk and rapid livelihood adaptation – by contrast with the more heavy-handed interventions that were the norm thirty years ago. The concept of ‘resilience’ has become a buzzword in development circles. Maxwell and Majid are skeptical about its universal applicability, for it allows aid organizations to sidestep ‘the sticky issues of clan, land and natural resource access, power, governance, basic service provision, and corruption’ (169).

Some factors aggravating the outcome of this famine would be familiar to chroniclers of other crises: food price inflation; environmental degradation; social stratification (the marginalized Rahanweyn and Somali Bantu were among the most afflicted groups); delays in responding to early warnings; the reluctance of aid agencies to adequately analyze and publicly admit their errors; profiteering; and, opportunism. Maxwell and Majid outline the complex history of Somalia since 1970, with its recurring humanitarian crises, external interventions, and large-scale population movements. A culmination of this history was the brief rule of the Islamic Courts Union in the south during the second half of 2006, followed by the Ethiopian invasion and the rise of the most radicalized element of the Courts, Al-Shabaab, with self-acknowledged links to Al-Qaeda, as the main opposition to the newly installed Transitional Federal Government. In 2011–12, Al-Shabaab was under heavy military pressure but still controlled large areas of the south.

Al-Shabaab imposed grave obstacles on external aid agencies, expelling many of them, demanding ‘taxes’, and, sometimes, attacking aid workers. The agencies tended to transfer risk to local staff or ‘partners’. Though the more experienced agencies had long been accustomed to negotiating (reluctantly) with uncooperative governments for access, the intransigence of Al-Shabaab was met by the global reach of draconian counterterrorist measures introduced in the United States since the attacks of 11 September 2001. The principle underlying these measures was (and still is today) to condemn every quantum of aid as tainted if it is deemed to support, even in part, the purposes of a terrorist organization. Funding for food aid and other assistance from the United States was much delayed for this reason in early 2011 and doubts remained throughout the crisis about the relative weight attached by the US government to humanitarian as opposed to counterterrorist priorities.

Maxwell and Majid devote considerable space to the interventions by Muslim aid agencies from Turkey and the Middle East – too frequently condescended to by the Western aid establishment as ‘non-traditional’ or ‘emerging’. They were less professionalized, but many of their aid workers demonstrated a strong solidarity with affected communities: ‘Non-Western actors – particularly Islamic actors – put the issues of charity and of voluntary action squarely back in the centre of humanitarianism, at least in terms of intention’ (196). This argument could be related to a more general current debate about the extent to which Islamic NGOs have an advantage of ‘cultural proximity’ in Muslim-majority populations.

Maxwell and Majid propose some possible remedies for what they call the ‘humanitarian malaise’, mainly to do with reasserting humanitarian principles and promoting open dialogue and stricter accountability (among recipient communities as well as donors). If there is a gap in their comprehensive analysis, it is that they give little attention to the processes whereby resources for emergency aid are selectively mobilized through media representations of distant suffering. But this is an indispensable book which, if read and absorbed by decision-makers, might help to reprieve humanitarian action from condemnation to an eternal recurrence of failure. At the time of writing this review in October 2016, 1.1 million Somalis are facing acute food insecurity.