The Triangle Theory of Violence

Rob Nixon…describes “slow violence” as a delayed destruction, occurring attritionally across space and time, and often out of sight. 

   Thom Davies/Arshad Isakjee/Surindar Dhesi

Such moments made Scorsese describe ‘The Age of Innocence’ as one of “the most violent” films he’s ever made. Even if, as he has also explained, the violence is expressed “through very elaborate etiquette and ritual.

   Sam Jordison

To offer a hurried synopsis: Johan Galtung defines violence ‘as avoidable insults to basic human needs, and more generally to life...' It thwarts or exterminates potential - he further defines it as: ‘…the cause of the difference between the potential and the actual, between what could have been and what is.'(Galtung ) And as he defines it: ‘...violence is that which increases the distance between the potential and the actual, and that which impedes the decrease of this distance.' This is the case only if these harms are avoidable; if you were to amputate someone's arm without using anesthetic at a point in history when anesthetics were unavailable then such an act would not be seen as unethical or, in Galtung's terms, violent; if there was an anesthetic on the shelf and you did not use it then we would view the act as violent. In connection to this, it might be worth noting that: ‘...there is also indirect violence insofar as insight and resources are channeled away from constructive efforts to bring the actual closer to the potential.’

According to Galtung's formulation, violence can be divided into three kinds, or at least, he posits three kinds in order to bring some clarity to the subject. We could view these three types or components as being a part of one system such that neither one can be understood without understanding its interconnections and its interactions with the others. However, his analysis is a lot more subtle than this. He says that they may be seen as ‘...logically independent even though they are continuous with each other: one shades into the other.’ Cultural violence is justificatory in nature - it renders the other kinds acceptable to us or even good; Galtung has the following to say about this type: ‘Cultural violence makes direct and structural violence look, even feel, right — at least not wrong...One way cultural violence works is by changing the moral color of an act from red/wrong to green/right or at least to yellow/acceptable...Another way is by making reality opaque, so that we do not see the violent act or fact, or at least not as violent.' Another kind is the conspicuous direct violence that we are more familiar with - popular concepts of justice focus on this kind, predicated as they are on such things as the pragmatics of (individual) accountability; cultural and structural aspects cannot be readily pinned on anyone and as such they are concealed by culturally mediated blind spots - this ‘blindness' is seen here as another form of cultural/structural violence. It goes without saying that killing increases the distance between the potential and the actual to it's limit point - the distance between those killed and their potential is infinite. And that: ‘Direct violence...may be physical violence such as physical assault, killing, etc.’(Kalpalata Dutta) But ‘...it can also be psychological violence or behavior that causes trauma, anxiety, or stress’.(Dutta) It can involve bullying and manipulation in that they diminish our capacity to meet basic human needs. And all three components (cultural, systemic and direct) can reach the same limit point.

They are, confusingly and as a matter of course, separated out such that interconnections between them (the ways in which they are continuous with each other) are obscured or invisible; in general, each division - structure, culture and immediate action - are addressed independently. It's important, I think, to note that his work (and the work of people who have further developed his analysis) contains far less abstract, less sanitized illustrations than the treatment given here. And as Galtung says: ‘After some time, direct violence is forgotten...and only two labels show up, pale enough for college textbooks: “discrimination” for massive structural violence and “prejudice” for massive cultural violence. Sanitation of language: itself cultural violence.’ Rob Nixon's ‘Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor’ also contains far less abstract, less sanitized illustrations; though Nixon distinguishes slow violence from Galtung’s theory and practice, they are compatible.

Slow Violence is distinguished in that it '...emphasizes change and movement, the extensive temporalities, slow moving mutations, and imperceptible ecological transformations that are constitutive of modern power structures, through which, as he puts it, ‘time becomes an actor.’(Lindsay Dillon)

Finally, there is structural violence; here Galtung compares the forms taken by, and our relationship with, the direct and the structural: Direct incarnations are ‘...easily captured and expressed verbally since...' they have the ‘...same structure as elementary sentences in (at least Indo European) languages: subject-verb-object, with both subject and object being persons. Violence without this relation is structural, built into structure.' Built into structure and difficult to capture and express such that even the object of structural violence may be persuaded not to perceive it at all. ‘Personal violence represents change and dynamism...Structural violence is silent, it does not show - it is essentially static, it is the tranquil waters.’

Working in an analytic tradition Galtung arrived at the same destination that Martin Luther King reached via a Baptist/Christian tradition. Galtung would agree with the following: ‘peace is not merely the absence of...tension, but the presence of justice. And even if we didn’t have this tension, we still wouldn’t have positive peace...it would be a peace that boiled down to stagnant complacency, deadening passivity and if peace means this, I don’t want peace’.  

Peace is not the ‘tranquil waters’ because conditions (however they may appear) are far from peaceful - they are structurally violent, which is to say that they are unjust; creating relatively just societies or polities is synonymous with creating relative 'positive' peace. ‘Violence is built into the structure and shows up as unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances...The situation is aggravated further if the persons low on income are also low in education, low on health, and low on power - as is frequently the case because these rank dimensions tend to be heavily correlated due to the way they are tied together in the social structure’.(Galtung) Those who benefit from the false peace that is an apparent absence of violence are less likely to want the true peace that is the presence of justice. And those subject to structural violence are less able to struggle for the same.

Here is another quote (interpreting Mt 10:34-36) from Martin Luther Kings sermon: When Peace Becomes Obnoxious: ‘I come not to bring this peace of escapism, this peace that fails to confront the real issues of life...I come to bring a sword - not a physical sword - and whenever I come a conflict is precipitated between the old and the new, between justice and injustice...’ He called this metaphorical sword: agapē, unarmed truth or soul force. Because the rank dimensions posited by Galtung tend to be strongly correlated 'soul force' is another capacity that, for many, is unreachable.

The Jericho Road, Luther King said, must be transformed.