Chomsky

I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them; unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom. That includes political power, ownership and management, relations among men and women, parents and children, our control over the fate of future generations (the basic moral imperative behind the environmental movement, in my view), and much else. Naturally this means a challenge to the huge institutions of coercion and control: the state, the unaccountable private tyrannies that control most of the domestic and international economy, and so on. But not only these. That is what I have always understood to be the essence of anarchism: the conviction that the burden of proof has to be placed on authority, and that it should be dismantled if that burden cannot be met. Sometimes the burden can be met. If I’m taking a walk with my grandchildren and they dart out into a busy street, I will use not only authority but also physical coercion to stop them. The act should be challenged, but I think it can readily meet the challenge. And there are other cases; life is a complex affair, we understand very little about humans and society, and grand pronouncements are generally more a source of harm than of benefit. But the perspective is a valid one, I think, and can lead us quite a long way.

Noam Chomsky

Harvey

The belief that we can through conscious thought and action change both the world we live in and ourselves for the better defines a humanist tradition. The secular version of this tradition overlaps with and has often been inspired by religious teachings on dignity, tolerance, compassion, love and respect for others. Humanism, both religious and secular, is a world view that measures its achievements in terms of the liberation of human potentialities, capacities and powers. It subscribes to the Aristotelian vision of the uninhibited flourishing of individuals and the construction of ‘the good life’. Or, as one contemporary renaissance man, Peter Buffett defines it, a world which guarantees to individuals ‘the true flourishing of his or her nature or the opportunity to live a joyful and fulfilled life’.[2]

 

This tradition of thought and action has waxed and waned from time to time and from place to place but never seems to die. It has had to compete, of course, with more orthodox doctrines that variously assign our fates and fortunes to the gods, to a specific creator and deity, to the blind forces of nature, to social evolutionary laws enforced through genetic legacies and mutations, by iron laws of economics that dictate the course of technological evolution, or to some hidden teleology dictated by the world spirit. Humanism also has its excesses and its dark side. The somewhat libertine character of renaissance humanism led one of its leading exponents, Erasmus, to worry that the Judaeo-Christian tradition was being traded in for those of Epicurus. Humanism has sometimes lapsed into a Promethean and anthropocentric view of human capacities and powers in relationship to everything that exists – including nature – even to the point where some deluded beings believe that we, being next to God, are Übermenschen having dominion over the universe. This form of humanism becomes even more pernicious when identifiable groups in a population are not considered worthy of being considered human. This was the fate of many indigenous populations in the Americas as they faced colonial settlers. Designated as ‘savages’, they were considered a part of nature and not a part of humanity. Such tendencies are alive and well in certain circles, leading the radical feminist Catherine MacKinnon to write a book on the question, ARE WOMEN HUMAN?[3] That such exclusions have in many people’s eyes a systematic and generic character in modern society is indicated by the popularity of Giorgio Agamben’s formulation of ‘the state of exception’ in which so many people now exist in the world (with the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay being a prime example).[4]

 

There are plenty of contemporary signs that the enlightened humanist tradition is alive and well, perhaps even staging a comeback. This is the spirit that clearly animates the hordes of people employed around the world in NGOs and other charitable institutions whose mission is to improve the life chances and prospects of the less fortunate. There are even vain attempts to dress up capital itself in the humanist garb of what some corporate leaders like to call Conscious Capitalism, a species of entrepreneurial ethics that looks suspiciously like conscience laundering along with sensible proposals to improve worker efficiency by seeming to be nice to them.[5] All the nasty things that happen are absorbed as unintentional collateral damage in an economic system motivated by the best of ethical intentions. Humanism is, however, the spirit that inspires countless individuals to give of themselves unstintingly and often without material reward to contribute selflessly to the well-being of others. Christian, Jewish, Islamic and Buddhist humanisms have spawned widespread religious and charitable organisations, as well as iconic figures like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa and Bishop Tutu. Within the secular tradition there are many varieties of humanist thought and practice, including explicit currents of cosmopolitan, liberal, socialist and Marxist humanism. and, of course, moral and political philosophers have over the centuries devised a variety of conflicting ethical systems of thought based in a variety of ideals of justice, cosmopolitan reason and emancipatory liberty that have from time to time supplied revolutionary slogans. Liberty, equality, fraternity were the watchwords of the French revolution. The earlier US Declaration of Independence, followed by the US Constitution and, perhaps even more significantly, that stirring document called the Bill of Rights have all played a role in animating subsequent political movements and constitutional forms. The remarkable constitutions recently adopted in Bolivia and Ecuador show that the art of writing progressive constitutions as the basis for regulating human life is by no means dead. And the immense literature that this tradition has spawned has not been lost on those who have sought a more meaningful life. Just think of the past influence of Tom Paine’s RIGHTS OF MAN or Mary Wollstonecraft’s A VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN within the English-speaking world to see what I mean (almost every tradition in the world has analogous writings to celebrate).

 

There are two well-known undersides to all of this, both of which we have already encountered. The first is that however noble the universal sentiments expressed at the outset, it has time and again proved hard to stop the universality of humanist claims being perverted for the benefit of particular interests, factions and classes. This is what produces the philanthropic colonialism of which Peter Buffett so eloquently complains. This is what twists Kant’s noble cosmopolitanism and quest for perpetual peace into a tool of imperialist and colonial cultural domination, currently represented by the Hilton Hotel cosmopolitanism of CNN and the frequent business-class flier. This is the problem that has bedevilled the doctrines of human rights enshrined in a UN declaration that privileges the individual rights and private property of liberal theory at the expense of collective relations and cultural claims. This is what turns the ideals and practices of freedom into a tool of governmentality for the reproduction and perpetuation of capitalist class affluence and power. The second problem is that the enforcement of any particular system of beliefs and rights always involves some disciplinary power, usually exercised by the state or some other institutionalised authority backed by force. The difficulty here is obvious. The UN declaration implies state enforcement of individual human rights when the state so often is first in line violating those rights.

 

The difficulty with the humanist tradition in short is that it does not internalise a good understanding of its own inescapable internal contradictions, most clearly captured in the contradiction between freedom and domination. The result is that humanist leanings and sentiments often get presented these days in a somewhat offhand and embarrassed way, except when their position is safely backed by religious doctrine and authority. There is, as a result, no full-blooded contemporary defence of the propositions of or prospects for a secular humanism even though there are innumerable individual works that loosely subscribe to the tradition or even polemicise as to its obvious virtues (as happens in the NGO world). Its dangerous traps and foundational contradictions, particularly questions of coercion, violence and domination, are shied away from because they are too awkward to confront. The result is what Frantz Fanon characterised as ‘insipid humanitarianism’. There is plenty of evidence of that manifest in its recent revival. The bourgeois and liberal tradition of secular humanism forms a mushy ethical base for largely ineffective moralising about the sad state of the world and the mounting of equally ineffective campaigns against the plights of chronic poverty and environmental degradation. It is probably for this reason that the French philosopher Louis Althusser launched his fierce and influential campaign back in the 1960s to eject all talk of socialist humanism and alienation from the Marxist tradition. The humanism of the young Marx, as expressed in THE ECONOMIC AND PHILOSOPHIC MANUSCRIPTS OF 1844, Althusser argued, was separated from the scientific Marx of CAPITAL by an ‘epistemological rupture’ that we ignore at our peril. Marxist humanism, he wrote, is pure ideology, theoretically vacuous and politically misleading, if not dangerous. The devotion of a dedicated Marxist like the long-imprisoned Antonio Gramsci to the ‘absolute humanism of human history’ was, in Althusser’s view, entirely misplaced.[6]

 

The enormous increase in and nature of the complicitous activities of the humanist NGOs over recent decades would seem to support Althusser’s criticisms. The growth of the charitable industrial complex mainly reflects the need to increase ‘conscience laundering’ for a world’s oligarchy that is doubling its wealth and power every few years in the midst of economic stagnation. Their work has done little or nothing in aggregate to deal with human degradation and dispossession or proliferating environmental degradation. This is structurally so because anti-poverty organisations are required to do their work without ever interfering in the further accumulation of the wealth from which they derive their sustenance. If everyone who worked in an anti-poverty organisation converted overnight to an anti-wealth politics we would soon find ourselves living in a very different world. Very few charitable donors, not even Peter Buffett I suspect, would fund that. And the NGOs, which are now at the centre of the problem, would not in any case want that (though there are many individuals within the NGO world who would but simply can’t).

 

So what kind of humanism do we need in order to progressively change the world through anti-capitalist work into another kind of place populated by different kinds of people?

 

There is, I believe, a crying need to articulate a secular revolutionary humanism that can ally with those religious-based humanisms (most clearly articulated in both Protestant and Catholic versions of the theology of liberation as well as in cognate movements within Hindu, Islamic, Jewish and indigenous religious cultures) to counter alienation in its many forms and to radically change the world from its capitalist ways. There is a strong and powerful – albeit problematic – tradition of secular revolutionary humanism both with respect to both theory and political practice. This is a form of humanism that Louis Althusser totally rejected. But, in spite of Althusser’s influential intervention, it has a powerful and articulate expression in the Marxist and radical traditions as well as beyond. It is very different from bourgeois liberal humanism. It refuses the idea that there is an unchanging or pre-given ‘essence’ of what it means to be human and forces us to think hard about how to become a new kind of human. It unifies the Marx of CAPITAL with that of THE ECONOMIC AND PHILOSOPHIC MANUSCRIPTS OF 1844 and arrows in to the heart of the contradictions of what any humanist programme must be willing to embrace if it is to change the world. It clearly recognises that the prospects for a happy future for most are invariably marred by the inevitability of dictating the unhappiness of some others. A dispossessed financial oligarchy which cannot any more partake of caviar and champagne lunches on their yachts moored off the Bahamas will doubtless complain at their diminished fates and fortunes in a more egalitarian world. We may, as good liberal humanists, even feel a bit sorry for them. Revolutionary humanists steel themselves against that thought. While we may not approve of this ruthless approach to dealing with such contradictions, we have to acknowledge the basic honesty and self-awareness of the practitioners.

 

Consider, as one example, the revolutionary humanism of someone like Frantz Fanon. Fanon was a psychiatrist working in hospitals in the midst of a bitter and violent anti-colonial war (rendered so memorable in Pontecorvo’s film THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS – a film, incidentally, that the US military now uses for anti-insurgency training purposes). Fanon wrote in depth about the struggle for freedom and liberty on the part of colonised peoples against the colonisers. His analysis, though specific to the Algerian case, illustrates the sorts of issues that arise in any liberation struggle, including those between capital and labour. But it does so in stark dramatic and more easily legible terms precisely because it incorporates the additional dimensions of racial, cultural and colonial oppressions and degradations giving rise to an ultra-violent revolutionary situation from which no peaceful exit seems possible. The foundational question for Fanon is how to recover a sense of humanity on the basis of the dehumanising practices and experiences of colonial domination. ‘As soon as you and your fellow men are cut down like dogs,’ he writes in THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH, ‘there is no other solution but to use every means available to re-establish your weight as a human being. You must therefore weigh as heavily as possible on your torturer’s body so that his wits, which have wandered off somewhere, can at last be restored to their human dimension.’ In this way ‘man both demands and claims his infinite humanity’. There are always ‘tears to be wiped away, inhuman attitudes to be fought, condescending ways of speech to be ruled out, men to be humanised’. Revolution, for Fanon, was not simply about the transfer of power from one segment of society to another. It entailed the reconstruction of humanity – in Fanon’s case a distinctive post-colonial humanity – and a radical shift in the meaning attached to being human. ‘Decolonisation is truly the creation of new men. But such a creation cannot be attributed to a supernatural power. The “thing” colonised becomes a man through the very process of liberation.’ It was therefore inevitable in a colonial situation, Fanon argued, that the struggle for liberation would have to be constituted in nationalist terms. But ‘if nationalism is not explained, enriched, deepened, if it does not very quickly turn into a social and political consciousness, into humanism, then it leads to a dead end’.[7]

 

Fanon, of course, shocks many liberal humanists with his embrace of a necessary violence and his rejection of compromise. How, he asks, is non-violence possible in a situation structured by the systematic violence exercised by the colonisers? What is the point of starving people going on hunger strike? Why, as Herbert Marcuse asked, should we be persuaded of the virtues of tolerance towards the intolerable? In a divided world, where the colonial power defines the colonised as subhuman and evil by nature, compromise is impossible. ‘One does not negotiate with evil,’ famously said Vice-President Dick Cheney. To which Fanon had a ready-made reply: ‘The work of the colonist is to make even dreams of liberty impossible for the colonised. The work of the colonised is to imagine every possible method for annihilating the colonist … The theory of the “absolute evil of the colonist” is in response to the theory of the “absolute evil of the native”.’ In such a divided world there is no prospect of negotiation or compromise. This is what has kept the USA and Iran so far apart ever since the Iranian Revolution. ‘The native sector’ of the colonial city, Fanon points out, ‘is not complementary to the European sector … The city as a whole is governed by a purely Aristotelian logic’ and follows the ‘dictates of mutual exclusion’. Lacking a dialectical relation between the two, the only way to break down the difference is through violence. ‘To destroy the colonial world means nothing less than demolishing the colonist’s sector, burying it deep within the earth or banishing it from the territory.’[8] There is nothing mushy about such a programme. As Fanon saw clearly:

 

For the colonised this violence is invested with positive formative features because it constitutes their only work. This violent praxis is totalising since each individual represents a violent link in a great chain, in the almighty body of violence rearing up in reaction to the primary violence of the coloniser … at the individual level, violence is a cleansing force. It rids the colonised of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude. It emboldens them and restores their self-confidence. Even if the armed struggle has been symbolic, and even if they have been demobilised by rapid decolonisation, the people have time to realise their liberation was the achievement of each and every one …[9]

But what is so stunning about THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH, and what indeed brings tears to the eyes on a close reading and makes it so searingly human, is the second half of the book, which is taken up by devastating descriptions of the psychic traumas of those on both sides who found themselves forced by circumstances to participate in the violence of the liberation struggle. We now know much more about the psychic damage suffered by those US and other soldiers who engaged in military action in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, and the terrible scourge on their lives as a result of post-traumatic stress disorder. This is what Fanon wrote about with such compassion in the midst of the revolutionary struggle against the colonial system in Algeria. After decolonisation there is an immense work that remains to be done, not only to repair the psyches of damaged souls, but also to mitigate what Fanon clearly saw as the dangers of the lingering effects (even replication) of colonial ways of thought and being. ‘The colonised subject fights in order to put an end to domination. But he must also ensure that all the untruths planted within him by the oppressor are eliminated. In a colonial regime such as the one in Algeria the ideas taught by colonialism impacted not only the European minority but also the Algerian. Total liberation involves every facet of the personality … independence is not a magic ritual but an indispensable condition for men and women to live in true liberation, in other words to master all the material resources necessary for a radical transformation of society.’[10]

 

I do not raise the question of violence here, any more than did Fanon, because I am or he was in favour of it. He highlighted it because the logic of human situations so often deteriorates to a point where there is no other option. Even Gandhi acknowledged that. But the option has potentially dangerous consequences. Revolutionary humanism has to offer some kind of philosophical answer to this difficulty, some solace in the face of incipient tragedies. While the ultimate humanist task may be, as Aeschylus put it 2,500 years ago, ‘to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world’, this cannot be done without confronting and dealing with the immense violence that underpins the colonial and neocolonial order. This is what Mao and Ho Chi Minh had to confront, what Che Guevara sought to achieve, and what a host of political leaders and thinkers in post-colonial struggles, including Amilcar Cabral of Guinea-Bissau, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, and Aimé Césaire, Walter Eodney, C.L.R. James and many others, have acted against with such conviction in both words and deeds.

 

But is the social order of capital any different in essence from its colonial manifestations? That order has certainly sought to distance itself at home from the callous calculus of colonial violence (depicting it as something that must necessarily be visited on uncivilised others ‘over there’ for their own good). It had to disguise at home the far too blatant inhumanity it demonstrated abroad. ‘Over there’ things could be put out of sight and hearing. Only now, for example, is the vicious violence of the British suppression of the Mau Mau movement in Kenya in the 1960s being acknowledged in full. When capital drifts close to such inhumanity at home it typically elicits a similar response to that of the colonised. To the degree that it embraced racialised violence at home, as it did in the United States, it produced movements like the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam along with leaders like Malcolm X and, in his final days, Martin Luther King, who saw the connectivity between race and class and suffered the consequences thereof. But capital learned a lesson. The more race and class get woven seamlessly together, then the faster the fuse for revolution burns. But what Marx makes so clear in CAPITAL is the daily violence constituted in the domination of capital over labour in the marketplace and in the act of production as well as on the terrain of daily life. How easy it is to take descriptions of contemporary labour conditions in, for example, the electronics factories of Shenzhen, the clothing factories of Bangladesh or the sweatshops of Los Angeles and insert them into Marx’s classic chapter on ‘the working day’ in CAPITAL and not notice the difference. How shockingly easy it is to take the living conditions of the working classes, the marginalised and the unemployed in Lisbon, São Paulo and Jakarta and put them next to Engels’s classic 1844 description of THE CONDITION OF THE WORKING CLASS IN ENGLAND and find little substantive difference.[11]

DAVID HARVEY

“What comes afterwards is not some cheap synthesis—reconciliation is precisely for Hegel reconciliation with the horror, the necessity of mistake.”

Slavoj Zizek

Gil Eyal (On Ehrenburg)

 

If depression is today the most diagnosed mental disorder the world over this is not because it was medicalized and over-diagnosed, as a hasty sociology of professions would lead one to suggest, but because the diagnosis – however imprecise – responds to a real crisis of the individual in post-disciplinary society. At some point around the mid-20th century, the society of discipline and norms that fixed the individual in her place has been destabilized and has given way to a society organized around the sovereign individual, who is free to set her own norms of self-development, who is responsible for her destiny and who therefore finds herself in a void, not knowing how to act, nor even why is it preferable to act. The melancholia once reserved as the privilege of a few great geniuses, has now become a depression available to anybody. To the neo-liberal creed of “everything is permitted”, the depressed individual replies “but nothing is possible”.

Gil Eyal

Conway

The disabled, or those who are not “sound” in mind or body, disrupt the harmony of society. “Those who are diseased in their bodies they will leave to die, and the corrupt and incurable souls they will put an end to themselves” (Book III, Republic). It is worth noting that passive, almost completely fluid, shift from the pathological to the moral". 

       Will Conway

Rosenhan

It has long been known that elements are given meaning by the context in which they occur.

David Rosenhan

Potter

Oedipus “is the land’s pollution” and the polis is the body with the “pollution grown ingrained within.” Oedipus and the polis mutually reflect each others pathology.

Brent Potter

Friedli

Mental health is produced socially: the presence or absence of mental health is above all a social indicator and therefore requires social, as well as individual solutions. A focus on collective efficacy, as well as personal efficacy is required. A preoccupation with individual symptoms may lead to a ‘disembodied psychology’ which separates what goes on inside people’s heads from social structure and context. How things are done (values and culture) and how things are distributed (economic and fiscal policy) are the key domains that influence and are influenced by how people think, feel and relate. Mental health promotion has made and continues to make a significant contribution to our understanding of the wider determinants of health and the crucial relationship between social position and emotion, cognition and social function or relatedness. What difference does it make if discomfort and difficulties are shared by everyone? These questions lie at the heart of current debates about the social determinants of health, the relative contribution of material, psycho-social and biological factors and the effects of inequalities (Lynch et al 2000; Wilkinson and Pickett 2006; Dahlgren and Whitehead 2006).5

Dr Lynne Friedli

The CSDH is concerned with the link between health and position in the social hierarchy and the role of stratification. It sees the axes of social stratification as socio/economic, political and cultural and identifies three key domains for action/empowerment: material requisites, psycho-social (control over lives) and political voice (participation in decision making). At the heart of the report is the view that achieving a more equitable distribution of power requires collective social action.

Dr Lynne Friedli

The CSDH is concerned with the link between health and position in the social hierarchy and the role of stratification. It sees the axes of social stratification as socio/economic, political and cultural and identifies three key domains for action/empowerment: • material requisites • psycho-social (control over lives) • political voice (participation in decision making) At the heart of the report is the view that achieving a more equitable distribution of power requires collective social action.

Dr Lynne Friedli

Socio economic position (SEP) refers to the position of individuals in the hierarchy and is inherently unequal, shaping access to resources and every aspect of experience in the home, neighbourhood and workplace. SEP structures individual and collective experiences of dominance, hierarchy, isolation, support and inclusion. Social position also influences constructs like identity and social status, which impact on wellbeing, for example, through the effects of low self esteem, shame, disrespect and ‘invidious comparison’.

Dr Lynne Friedli 

Habermas

When stripped of their ideological veils, the imperatives of autonomous subsystems make their way into the lifeworld from the outside—like colonial masters coming into a tribal society—and force a process of assimilation upon it. The diffused perspectives of the local culture cannot be sufficiently coordinated to permit the play of the metropolis and the world market to be grasped from the periphery.

Jurgen Habermas 

 Lucienne Lunn, Daniel J. Christie, in Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace, & Conflict (Third Edition), 2022

Cultural and Structural Violence

Structural violence is also legitimized through narratives that justify enormous differences in economic security. System justification, in which people accept the status quo social, political, and economic arrangements of a society, can take many forms. Poverty, for example, can be justified by “blaming the victim” for failing to fully internalize the “protestant ethic,” which values individualism, hard work, and delay of gratification. People with few material resources are expected to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps,” eschew the safety net, and adopt a sense of individual responsibility. In the 1800s, Horatio Alger's stories of teenage boys who escaped poverty through hard work were popular in the United States, as they were consistent with the belief in the American dream of upward mobility for all. In the last 50 years, however, there has been very little upward mobility in the United States. Nevertheless, the narrative continues to attribute poverty and difficult life conditions to the purported failings of those whose basic needs are unsatisfied, not to the structure of political and economic institutions in a society. It is a formula that places all of the burden on individual responsibility, rather than framing the equitable distribution of power and wealth as a social responsibility.

Similarly, the structural violence of racism and sexism is also legitimized through cultural narratives. Racism has deep roots, but its modern iteration can be found in the subjugation of Africans through the brutality of colonialism and slavery. Inhumane treatment was justified by a number of narratives: the Bible's approval of the practice; the imagined inferiority of Africans; paternalistic impulses; and the view of Africans as less than human. Long after the American slave trade had been abolished, the myths that justified slavery continued to be influential and ramified around narratives of intellectual inferiority, sexual promiscuity, and laziness. These and other narratives justified the disenfranchisement and exclusion of nonwhites when the Declaration of Independence was drafted; later, Jim Crow laws justified segregation to protect the white stock from contamination by blacks.

Women were also excluded from the declaration that “all men are created equal” and were not truly guaranteed the inalienable right to liberty. Patriarchy remains the dominant social system and cultural ethos worldwide—men control the narrative, enjoy moral authority, and disproportionately occupy seats of economic and political power. Sexist narratives are even implicated in self-objectification, which occurs when women internalize others' views that they are objects to be judged on the basis of their appearance.

The recent surge of right-wing populism in many parts of the world has given rise to xenophobic forms of aggression and racism. The narrative of populism frames intergroup relations as a battle between the nationalistic impulses of “ordinary” masses versus a corrupt “elite” that favors and benefits from globalism. Migrants are often singled out as threats to racial purity, economic well-being, and the very existence of a nation. Fueled by fear of the other, populist leaders promulgate nativist notions and promise to protect the interests and dominance of the ordinary masses, typically through authoritarian forms of leadership. Historically, nationalism has been a force that united diverse people, generating social cohesion and interdependence between rival tribes and identity groups within a nation. Indeed, “love of country” (i.e., patriotism) has often fostered harmony among people. However, when the kind of nationalism that arises ties ingroup amity to outgroup enmity, xenophobia and racism are likely consequences.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/structural-violence

 While originally eschewing the term “exploitation,” as noted above, Galtung later included it as one of the “mechanisms” or “aspects” of structural violence (along with penetration, fragmentation, and marginalization). In a 1990 essay, he further pinpointed exploitation as a “center-piece” in his view of “the archetypal violent structure.” He combined the distinction between direct and structural violence with four classes of “basic needs,” yielding “a typology of violence” (see Table 1). The distinction between Exploitation A and Exploitation B is that the former refers to the situation where the “underdogs may in fact be so disadvantaged that they die (starve, waste away from diseases) from it,” while the latter refers to the situation in which the underdogs “may be left in a permanent, unwanted state of misery, usually including malnutrition and illness.” Suggesting that it is possible to label this table “anthropocentric,” Galtung noted that a fifth column (for the rest of nature) could be added at the beginning. As he did in 1969, Galtung urged acceptance of the direct violence–structural violence distinction because to do otherwise (i.e., to restrict “peace” to the study of direct violence) is “narrow” and, furthermore, leaves out important interconnections among types of violence, “particularly the way in which one type of violence may be reduced or controlled at the expense of increase or maintenance of another.”

Table 1. A typology of violence.

	Survival needs	Well-being needs	Identity needs	Freedom needs
Direct violence	Killing	Maiming, siege, sanctions, misery	Desocialization, resocialization, secondary citizen	Repression, detention, expulsion
Structural violence		Exploitation A	Exploitation B, segmentation	Penetration, marginalization, fragmentation

Galtung, J., 1990. Cultural violence. Journal of Peach Research 27(3), 291–305.

In his 1990 article, Galtung expanded his work on direct and structural violence by introducing the concept of “cultural violence,” which he defined as “those aspects of culture, the symbolic sphere of our existence—exemplified by religion and ideology, language and art, empirical science and formal science (logic, mathematics)—that can be used to justify or legitimize direct or structural violence.” He conceived of three “super-types” or overarching categories to make a “(vicious) violence triangle” image, leading to a “violence strata” image, and suggested that, generally, the causal flow is from cultural via structural to direct violence.

Brock-Utne explored and expanded the relationship between direct and indirect violence as she applied it to the field of peace education in her 1989 work. Table 2 presents her summary frame. In her 1989 work, she argued that while the six cells are logically independent of one another, this does not mean that there are no relationships between them; whether and what connections exist is to be decided empirically. She suggested research questions within each cell. For example, a focus on cell I (unorganized negative peace) could lead to an analysis of patriarchy and macho attitudes since they are relevant to both rapes and wife battery as well as to street killings. She also highlighted possible research questions for linking different cells. Is there, for example, more or less of cell I–type violence in periods of economic decline, which might lead to a type of structural violence, or in times of direct violence, that is, war and revolution? Or what is the relationship between organized direct and organized indirect violence (e.g., the relationship between the lives of women and children in developing countries and the money spent on weapons)? (Brock Utne, 1989).

Table 2. A summary of the concepts of negative and positive peace.

	Negative peace	Positive peace
Unorganized	Absence of personal physical and direct violence	Absence of indirect violence shortening life span	Absence of indirect violence reducing quality of life
	Absence of, for example, wife battering, rape, child abuse, dowry deaths, street killings	Absence of inequalities in microstructures leading to unequal life chances	Absence of repression in microstructures leading to less freedom of choice and fulfillment
Organized	Absence of, for example, war	Absence of economic structures in a country or between countries so that the life chances of some are reduced or effects of damage on nature by pollution, radiation, etc.	Absence of repression in a country of free speech, the right to organize, etc.

Brock-Utne, B., 1997. Linking the micro and macro in peace and development studies. In: Turpin, J., Kurtz, L.R. (Eds.) The web of violence: From interpersonal to global, University of Illinois Press, Chicago, IL, pp. 150–160.

Human rights and sustainable development goals mark the characteristic 21st-century thinking about the relationships among concepts such as violence, terrorism, war, poverty and inequality, globalization, development, and democracy. Genocide and civil wars in the late 20th and early 21st centuries contributed to this concern as did the more positive work emanating from the World Conference on Human Rights in 1993 and the 50th anniversary celebrations of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The second decade of the century was characterized by the 50th anniversaries of so many Civil Rights moments in the United States while at the same time contrasting behaviors amid policing and government repression across the country. Tensions grew over the threat vs. value of neoliberalism.

A human rights orientation calls for protecting and promoting the human dignity of each person as the foundation to the diminishment of violence, terrorism, war, poverty, and inequality, and to the augmentation of a more humane and inclusive kind of globalization, development, and democracy. The 21st century has brought peaks and troughs of change with Arab Spring, the rise of the Neo Nazi movement, and growing challenges to formerly binary views of the world (such as rising awareness of gender fluidity). Most of these insights have emerged through grassroots pressure, only later emerging in theoretical analysis. Clearly the somewhat simplistic model of direct vs. indirect violence is long overdue for an analytical update. Despite that, the insights that concept of “structural violence” remain important. Even with the rising terminology of systemic violence reserving historical understanding of how the analysis of violence in social systems has evolved provides a significant roadmap. Recognizing the structural aspects of violence moved social analysis away from individual blame and toward the integration of cultural and economic factors in our understanding of the interconnections of oppression and dignity. Growing insight into the concept has reconnected our understanding that violence may be larger than the individual but the role of people can never be completely extracted from the model. Someone must desire to oppress; someone must feel greedy for power.

Structural violence has also found an application in one of the significant areas of human well-being, the study of health disparities. Paul Farmer, a well-known medical anthropologist, has used the term since the 1990s to engage conversations around how medicine needs to see people in their contexts, not just as a combination of cells ripe for scientific study. In 2006 he wrote:

The term “structural violence” is one way of describing social arrangements that put individuals and populations in harm's way. The arrangements are structural because they are embedded in the political and economic organization of our social world; they are violent because they cause injury to people (typically, not those responsible for perpetuating such inequalities). With few exceptions, clinicians are not trained to understand such social forces, nor are we trained to alter them. Yet it has long been clear that many medical and public health interventions will fail if we are unable to understand the social determinants of disease (Farmer et al., 2006).

Health equity research is running into similar challenges to peace studies: structural violence is a cognitively appealing term but not easy to measure, particularly in quantitative ways. Political scientists have grappled with this as well (Dilts et al., 2012). It is the context, the cultural and economic operational space in which social relations impact daily experience. The violence is describable. The trauma is real. We measure with scores like ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) but the scores don't fully capture the damage done by the inequitable distribution of power and opportunity. Analyzing recent journal publications, DeMaio and Ansel (2018) discovered that increasingly structural violence is a key concept in health analysis, but the field still needs to mature in its use of the concept. However, they writes: “Perhaps most importantly, by naming social structures as a root cause of avoidable and unnecessary morbidity and mortality, the concept can be used as a counterweight to the belief that our current patterns of population health are natural” (p. 755). It seems likely that much could be gained from further dialogue among health (Farmer, DeMaio), policy (Dilts et al.), and peace studies toward a broader understanding of the measures and implications of structural, systemic, and cross generational violence (Table 4).

Table 4. Structural Violence: A comparison of Disciplines Table 4

Discipline/Perspective	How violence is used/portrayed	What structural violence adds
Medical Anthropology	Community issue Negative impact for quality of life. State claims justification for law in place.	Variables to define health and wellness in a community setting Intersectional thinking about health, disparity; and how to leverage connections More precise than “ social determinants of health” Used to point to the underlying structures of poor health
Peace Studies	Presence/Absence of war Physical or technological interaction	Illumination of micro conflict and daily impact Ways to measure “invisible” violence: disparities and deprivation Provides a longitudinal way to look at the societal and individual consequences of inequality Frames social/economic inequality as a form of violence
Political Science	Focus on the individual instigators in analysis of violence; Assumption that state violence can be necessary for; Treaties are good alternatives to threat Policy creation	Offers a means to point to “proof” the problems with neoliberalism Helps identify the catastrophic impact of long-term deprivation Systemic political structures such as treaties can be analyzed as legitimating violence Systemic practices like treaties can keep power dynamics between groups in place

Structural Violence

Kathleen M. Weigert, in Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace, & Conflict (Second Edition), 2008

Structural violence (also called indirect violence and, sometimes, institutionalized violence) is differentiated from personal violence (also called direct or behavioral) and refers to preventable harm or damage to persons (and by extension to things) where there is no actor committing the violence or where it is not practical to search for the actor(s); such violence emerges from the unequal distribution of power and resources or, in other words, is said to be built into the structure(s). This article discusses the origins, dimensions, development, and use of the term as well as the relationships between the two types of violence and examines various advantages and disadvantages for the concept’s use in peace research and peace action.

Themes in Paleopathology

Anne L. Grauer, Jane E. Buikstra, in Ortner's Identification of Pathological Conditions in Human Skeletal Remains (Third Edition), 2019

Structural Violence

Structural violence is a term that originated in peace studies (Galtung, 1969; see also Farmer et al., 2006; Klaus, 2012). It refers to social circumstances, frequently aspects of social structures or institutions that keep individuals from meeting basic needs—from a healthy existence. The intimate relationship between structural and behavioral violence is underscored by Gilligan (1996: 196), who argues that the “question as to which of the two forms of violence—structural or behavioral—is more important, dangerous, or lethal is moot, for they are inextricably related to each other, as cause to effect.”

While much has been published about behavioral violence detected by the presence of fractures and trauma in past populations, only recently has the concept of structural violence been integrated into paleopathological research. Its incorporation into skeletal analysis is an important one, as it allows us to move beyond the recognition of interpersonal aggression and begin to witness the life-long and postmortem effects of social inequity (Klaus, 2012). One growing body of research explores the ramifications of human exploitation and marginalization (Tegtmeyer and Martin, 2017). For instance, while the term “structural violence” was not expressly used, enslavement, low socioeconomic status, and other structural issues have figured heavily in de la Cova’s (2011, 2017) studies of documented collections. She began using the term formally in 2012. Examining the skeletal remains of individuals retained in the Hamann-Todd Human Osteological Collection, the Terry Collection, and the William Montague Cobb Collection, she argues that skeletal health disparities are evident between 19th-century-born African Americans and Euro-Americans due to “environmental conditions related to enslavement, post-liberation migration to the industrialized North, crowded urban living conditions, and poor sanitation” (de la Cova, 2011: 536). Such richly embedded studies hold excellent promise for nuanced perspectives on the complex nature of human health in situations wherein individuals are disadvantaged in circumstances beyond their control (de la Cova, 2017).

The effects of structural violence are also revealed in the postmortem treatment and disposition of human remains. Blakely and Harrington (1997), Mitchell (2012), and Nystrom (2017a: 16), are just a few of the researchers who have explored the “systemic political, economic, and social inequalities” that clearly influenced the bodies chosen for autopsy or dissection, and the means by which medical colleges, individuals, and organizations obtained human remains. Autopsy was performed to understand the cause of death or conditions impacting an individual. Dissection was performed on individuals stripped of their identity, rendering their bodies material objects, subjected to experimentation and display. Adding to the complex effects of structural violence is the fact that the racially and socially biased use and collection of skeletal remains in the past inherently affects our analyses today. These individuals, who suffered the effects of structural violence during and after their lives, problematically serve as the baseline skeletal series long assumed to be representative of human variability, and thus used for the development of standards used today for estimating age-at-death and sex (Nystrom 2014, 2017b).

Social Psychology of Violence

Daniel Christie, Michael Wessells, in Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace, & Conflict (Second Edition), 2008

Social Psychology of Structural and Cultural Violence

Structural violence is ubiquitous and manifest in the enormous gap between people who have influence and material resources and those who are relatively powerless. At the time of this writing, one-fifth of the world’s population has 80% of the income while the bottom one-fifth has only 1% of the income. Johan Galtung has proposed that one way to define structural violence is to calculate the number of avoidable deaths. For instance, if people die from scarcities of food or shelter when both are available for them somewhere in the world, then structural violence is taking place. As Gandhi once noted, there’s enough food for everyone’s needs but not for everyone’s greed. Structural violence is reduced when systems of production and distribution are more equitably organized.

Cultural violence occurs when symbolic processes are used to justify and legitimize inequitable power relations in political and economic systems. Cultural violence and hierarchical structures are mutually reinforcing, highly resistant to change, and operate at the individual level of analysis where scripts that guide behavior are internalized and at the aggregate level where shared narratives support hierarchical social arrangements.

Social psychological constructs that bear on cultural violence include the meritocratic ideology, a set of beliefs that support the proposition that rewards should be commensurate with one’s contribution to society. This ideology provides the value scaffolding for the capitalist notion, ‘to each according to his merit’. In turn, the capitalist ethos has built into it an acceptance of inequality and the continuous struggle for power within and between states, along with justifications for the use of force in the interest of domestic and international order. The protestant ethic, promulgated primarily by Western elites, emphasizes the values of individualism, hard work, and delay of gratification. The ideologically congruent notion of blaming the victim locates the origin of social problems in the purported deficits and failings of those whose basic needs are unsatisfied rather than in political and economic institutions. A cluster of companion beliefs cohere under the umbrella of just world thinking that rationalizes disparities in power and wealth by assuming the world is just. On this view, people get what they deserve.