Dispositional violence refers to the kind of violence that’s not always overt or physical but is embedded in the structures, habits, norms, and expectations of a society. It's a form of violence that arises not from direct intent, but from the conditions and dispositions that shape how people live, perceive, and interact.

Let me break it down:

📌 What Is It?

Dispositional violence is:

• Structural: It stems from institutional arrangements that harm certain groups (e.g., economic inequality, inaccessible healthcare, biased legal systems).
• Cultural: It’s reinforced through dominant narratives about who is “valuable,” “rational,” or “normal.”
• Habitual: It manifests in everyday practices—how people are spoken to, ignored, watched, or excluded.

🧠 Why It Matters in Conway’s Framework
Within the context of Will Conway’s writing (and thinkers like Foucault or Agamben), dispositional violence is:

• The background hum of exclusion—quietly determining whose errors are tolerated, whose incoherence is criminalized, and whose lives are considered disposable.
• Not a loud act of aggression, but a chronic condition of society that prepares the ground for overt violence.

Think of it like this: it’s the soil that makes systemic brutality grow. The language of prudence and civility, the norms of reasonableness—all these can quietly authorize harm before any explicit act occurs.

🌪️ A Disturbing Example
Take mental health treatment in certain carceral contexts: someone with a neurodivergent condition might be seen as erratic or threatening. Before any crime, before any act—structures already predispose society to see them as a threat. That’s dispositional violence: a readiness for exclusion or elimination, built into how we think and govern.

This concept ties in with ideas like slow violence (Rob Nixon) and the banality of evil (Arendt), where harm occurs not just in dramatic moments, but through everyday systems that quietly make some lives unlivable.