"With few notable exceptions (see Tyner and Rice 2015), relatively little has been written connecting Mbembe's necropolitical work with the idea of “structural violence” as posited by Johan Galtung (1969). This is surprising given that biological harm and the potentiality of death are central to necropower, which transcends the direct violence of genocide or active killing. Galtung has been highly influential in many academic fields, including sociology, anthropology and peace studies by defining “structural violence” as a means to analyse institutionalized forms of repression on Othered populations. He interrogates the idea of violence, arguing that it is “present when human beings are being influenced so that their actual somatic and mental realizations are below their potential” (1969:168). For Galtung, unlike “personal violence” by an individual “which shows” (1969:173), structural violence is more silent, more stealthy (see Li 2010)—concealed within the “hidden violence of abandonment” (Davies and Polese 2015:38). Structural violence maintains an unseen quality that is institutionalized within wider structures and therefore normalized (DeVerteuil 2015). In this way, violence can be seen as “a processual and unfolding moment, rather than as an ‘act’ or ‘outcome’” (Springer and Le Billon 2016:2). The spatialization of such suffering may not always be invisible in a literal sense, but the vulgar banality of structural brutality allows such everyday forms of violence to be hidden in plain view (Mbembe 1992). This theme is also taken up by Nixon (2011:2) who describes “slow violence” as a delayed destruction, occurring attritionally across space and time, and often out of sight. Structural violence tends to be latent rather than manifest. Yet it is also more consistent and more static, because unlike personal violence which is rarely legitimized explicitly by state authorities, structural violence is underpinned by social order itself (Galtung 1969:173). The notion of structural violence is also implicit within Mbembe's (2003) writing about the post-colony, in which necropolitics is framed as an institutional form of oppression upon the colonized body.

Galtung also distinguishes between the “physical” violence of being attached by direct contact such as being punched, burnt, poisoned or attacked with weapons, and “physiological” violence which is the denial of air, water, food or constrained movement (Galtung 1969:174). This latter form of violence is more likely to be structural in nature, and is evident in the empirical case study. Similarly, the “repressed topographies of cruelty” of which, Mbembe writes (2003:40), can also be interpreted as a spatialized form of structural and physiological violence. Structural violence takes place when certain people are “left to suffer in agonizing circumstances that are normalised through the law” (Gilbert and Ponder 2014). In these conditions, excluded groups may not be actively killed but are instead allowed to suffer the brutal indignity of harmful spatial environments. There is a danger of drawing too stark a divide between direct and structural violence (Loyd 2012; Tyner 2016b), indeed a violent accord can exist between them''.

Thom Davies, Arshad Isakjee, Surindar Dhesi