Structural Violence

Priyanthi FernandoExecutive Director, Centre for Poverty Analysis

(CEPA)University of Jaffna, Guest Lecture

Aim/Objective• Explore the concept of ‘structural

violence’ introduced by Johan Galtung in his 1969 essay Violence, Peace and Peace Research Also used by Paul Farmer, a medical anthropologist

• Discuss how ‘structural violence’ relates to the way in which – Laws can help effect change– Our own context

Galtung, Johan. "Violence, Peace, and Peace Research" Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 6, No. 3 (1969), pp. 167-191

This photograph by Eddie Adams, a war photographer, shows the cold blooded violence of a Vietcong guerrilla being shot at cold range by the Police Chief of Saigon on February 1, 1968. The man’s hands were tied behind his back when he was shot. Eddie Adams who had been a war photographer for 13 years won a Pulitzer Prize for this photograph. But he was so emotionally affected by this incident, that he changed his profession

On June 8, 1972 a US fighter jet bombed the village of Trang Bang in Vietnam with napalm. Kim Phuc was there with her family. With her clothes on fire the 9 year old little girl, ran away with other children. The photographer Nick Ut took this photograph at the moment when her clothes burned out. Kim stayed in hospital for 14 months and had 17 operations. Today she is married with two children. She lives in Canada where she is the President of the Kim Phuc Foundation whose mission is to help child victims of war.

On December 16, 2012, in Munirka, in South Delhi, a 23-year-old

female physiotherapy intern was beaten and gang raped in a private bus in which

she was travelling with a male friend. There were six others in the bus, including the driver, all of whom raped the woman

and beat her friend. The woman died from her injuries thirteen days later while undergoing emergency treatment in Singapore. There was widespread

condemnation of the incident in India and abroad. Subsequently, public protests

against the state and central governments for failing to provide adequate security for

women took place in New Delhi and in major cities throughout India

A series of violent incidents between wildcat strikers from a mine owned by Lonmin PLC in Marikana South Africa, and the Police, company security, the leadership of the National Union of

Mineworkers, culminated in a shooting incident on 16 August 2012

that the international media called the Marikana Massacre. Forty four (44)

people were killed, mostly mine workers, and at least 78 additional

workers were also injured. The total number of injured remain unknown.

The Marikana massacre was the single most lethal use of force by

South African security forces against civilians since 1960, and the end of the apartheid era. It was discovered that most of the victims were shot in the back and many victims were shot

far from police lines.

Direct Violence• Classic form of violence• Involves the use of physical force• Visible, intentional and direct• Eruptive, Catastrophic events• Attributable to a person or persons – there is a

perpetrator• An ‘assault or encroachment’ on the

physical/bodily integrity of another human being or his/her property

Limitations of the concept Direct Violence

• Positivist concept• Selective – so only certain forms on injury are recognised

as violent• An important challenge comes from Friedrich Engels’

who said that there are other kinds of violence that are unacknowledged and invisible.

• He implies that explicit or implicit cultural, political, legal and moral norms determine what is legitimate and illegitimate force, OR what kinds of injuries that are considered permissible and sanctioned and what are not.

When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another, such injury that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live—forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence—knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains

Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, Vol. 4, Marx EngelsCollectedWorks (New York: International Publishers, 1975), pp. 393–394,

Violence Triangle• Johan Galtung’s conceptualisation: violence is about preventing

human beings from achieving their physical and mental potential. • Three types of violence (even though the discourse has privileged

agent driven, direct forms of violence)– direct or personal violence– structural violence– cultural violence

Structural & Cultural Violence

• Structural Violence: is action built into the structures of society which show up as unequal power and unequal life chances; the unequal distribution of resources and the unequal distribution of power to decide over the distribution of resources

• Cultural Violence: aspects of the symbolic sphere, the culture of our society that is used to justify, or legitimise direct or structural violence

Characteristics of structural violence

• Depersonalised – no clear perpetrator, BUT• particular powerful interests are at work and• violence manifests itself as unequal power and

consequently as unequal life chances (Galtung)• On-going and pervasive – goes beyond independent

events• Invisible because• violence has been converted into structures of power

that are normalised and routinised, so it has become part of everyday life.

World hunger

• 842 million people , one in eight people in the world, do not have enough to eat.

• Almost all live in developing countries; 16 million live in developed countries

• Poor nutrition leads to about 5 million child deaths per year: every 5 seconds a child dies from a hunger related disease

• 60 % of the world's hungry are women

• Mothers undernourished because they feed other family members, especially children, first

World Hunger (contd)

• World agriculture produces 17% more calories per person today than it did 30 years ago, despite a 70 percent population increase. This is enough to provide everyone in the world with at least 2,720 kilocalories (kcal) per person per day

World Hunger (contd)So if we ARE producing sufficient food to feed the whole world, WHY are some people still going hungry?

War

Natural Causes

Lack of resources

Patriarchy

Harmful economic decision making

Inequality

2013 Water crisis in Maharashtra • largest number of dams in India,

built to generate power, provide water for millions of farmers and service the state industries.

• water resources ‘mismanaged’. • Water that was meant for farmers

diverted into power plants and the highly water intensive sugar cane industry.

• 60 percent of the water meant for small farmers diverted to the power sector between 2003 and 2011;

• Government policy no more than 5 percent of irrigated land can be used to grow sugarcane, ignored in Pune where nearly 40 percent of the total irrigated land is under cane cultivation.

Thousands of villages had little drinking water or fodder for cattle; Poor farmers migrated as environmental refugees; and someCommitted suicide because they had spent large amounts of money on costly seeds and chemicals, and couldn’t face crop failure

http://blogs.reuters.com/the-human-impact/2013/05/02/indias-drought-a-natural-calamity-or-a-man-made-one/

Corporatising agriculture• No investments in rehabilitating and

improving traditional seed production, plant breeding, and agro-ecological techniques that can increase productivity

• communities’ access to common areas of pasture, forest, or water sources.

• Small farmers’ capacity to have secure access and invest in their land hampered by large-scale land deals, which globally amounted to 203 million hectares (500 million acres) between 2000 and 2010

• Implications for– Dependence on fluctuating global

agricultural commodity markets– Food security of households

• Making land a commoditye.g. in Sierra Leone land purchases by big sugar cane and oil palm producers amount to 20% of peasants arable land

• Lowering tariffs on seeds

http://www.brettonwoodsproject.org/2014/05/corporatising-agriculture

PPP scheme bleeds Health System dry• Lesotho – mountainous country

and mainly rural; – world’s highest rate of HIV infection, – decreasing life expectancy increasing

infant and mortality rates, – 50% of Basotho under the poverty

line

• pressing need – develop a comprehensive network of primary and secondary health care services

• Undermined by one hospital that is consuming 51% of the country’s health budget

• World Bank promoting this model as something to be replicated across Africa

Queen ‘Mamahato Memorial Hospital – built in Maseru, capital of Lesotho under a PPP scheme that includes delivery of all clinical services by the private partner

Built under the advice of the IFC; private partner – consortium led by South African private health care company

FGM:female genital mutiliation• can cause severe bleeding and problems

urinating, infections, infertility as well as complications in childbirth

• Often leads to fistula – shame, abandonment by husbands, inability to bear children

• More than 125 million girls and women alive today have been cut in the 29 countries in Africa and Middle East where FGM is concentrated

• FGM is mostly carried out on young girls sometime between infancy and age 15.

• FGM is a violation of the human rights of girls and women.

http://youtu.be/t1ZYeh_JRc8

procedures that intentionally alter or cause injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons.

no health benefits for girls and women.

The End

Thank you!