Structural violence refers to harm that results from social structures or institutions that prevent groups from meeting their basic needs. Johan Galtung introduced the concept to describe indirect violence built into social, political and economic systems that disadvantages individuals and populations. The document discusses examples of structural violence like unequal access to resources causing hunger, mismanagement of water leading to drought, corporatization of agriculture disadvantaging small farmers, public-private partnerships draining health budgets, and cultural practices like female genital mutilation harming women's health and rights. Structural violence is invisible and normalized, but has severe impacts on human well-being and development.

1. Structural Violence
Priyanthi Fernando
Executive Director, Centre for Poverty
Analysis (CEPA)
University of Jaffna, Guest Lecture

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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.

5. 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

6. 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.

7. 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

8. 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.

9. 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 Engels
CollectedWorks (New York: International Publishers, 1975), pp. 393–394,

10. 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

11. 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

12. 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.

13. 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

14. 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

15. 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

16. 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 some
Committed 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/

17. 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 commodity
e.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

18. 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

19. 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.

20. The End
Thank you!