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.