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New Political Science

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Revisiting Johan Galtung's Concept of

Structural Violence
Andrew Dilts

Loyola Marymount University , USA

Published online: 21 May 2012.

To cite this article: Andrew Dilts (2012) Revisiting Johan Galtung's Concept of Structural Violence,
New Political Science, 34:2, 191-194, DOI: 10.1080/07393148.2012.676396
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New Political Science,

Volume 34, Number 2, June 2012

Symposium
Revisiting Johan Galtungs Concept of Structural
Violence

Downloaded by [University of California Santa Cruz] at 14:05 11 October 2014

Yves Winter, Guest Editor

Contributors:
Andrew Dilts

Loyola Marymount University, USA

Yves Winter

University of Minnesota, USA

Thomas Biebricher

Goethe-Universitat, Germany
Eric Vance Johnson

University of Florida, USA

Antonio Y. Vazquez-Arroyo,

University of Minnesota, USA

Joan Cocks

Mount Holyoke College, USA

Revisiting Johan Galtungs Concept of Structural

Violence
Andrew Dilts

Loyola Marymount University, USA

Introduction
This symposium is organized around a common concern: if we, as political
scientists, limit ourselves to an analytics of violence that points solely to agents
and intentions, we are sure to miss the pervasive forms of violence that are built
into structures, institutions, ideologies, and histories. Through an engagement
with the concept of structural violence, a term coined by Johan Galtung in his
path-breaking 1969 article, Violence, Peace, and Peace Research, each of the
authors collected here reflect on and extend Galtungs work to confront ways in
which violence shapes and reshapes our experiences that cannot be accounted for
by liability-based models of agency and force.1 They do so with the shared belief
1
Johan Galtung, Violence, Peace, and Peace Research, Journal of Peace Research 6:3
(1969), pp. 167 191.

ISSN 0739-3148 print/ISSN 1469-9931 on-line/12/020191-37 q 2012 Caucus for a New Political Science
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07393148.2012.676396

Downloaded by [University of California Santa Cruz] at 14:05 11 October 2014

192 Yves Winter et al.

that Galtungs work remains relevant to contemporary theory and practice, and
that this approach is particularly well suited to understanding our present
moment and our collective past.
Since these papers were first drafted, protests have broken out across the Middle
East and in Europe, especially Spain, Greece, and London. Each of these protests
has been read across a spectrum from violent to peaceful, and each has been
punctuated by forms of interpersonal, mass, and state violence. Throughout these
moments and events, the backdrop of natural and human made disasters, and
financial and fiscal crises has repeatedly forced elite and popular attention to the
bad apples, the responsible parties, and the guilty individuals. Whenever an
attempt might be made to account for the inherent violence of the seemingly
tranquil, stable, and peaceful conditions disrupted by these events, public
attention quickly gravitates towards the individuals responsible for breaking the
peace, from fallen political leaders to delinquents in the streets of London.
Members of the Occupy movement have pointed directly to the forms of systemic
violence and domination inherent in wealth and income inequality and demanded
an end to economic and political domination. These same protesters have been met
by naked brutality and personal violence at the hands of state police. In such a
moment, and in the difficult formulation of strategies of resistance, we are
reminded that the distinction between violence and non-violence is itself
contestable and far from self-evident in the character of actions (or actors) alone.
In the face of such direct physical force and under the conditions of neoliberalism,
our need to understand violences multiplicity of forms could not be more pressing.
To think of violence beyond billy clubs, batons, and barricades was Galtungs
goal over forty years ago. Hoping to overturn conventional thinking, he sought to
broaden our understanding of violence, not to dilute our ability to hold
individuals responsible for their actions, but rather to enhance our ability to
identify more clearly the ways in which stability and tranquility (often if not
always mistaken for peace) mask a deeper and more pervasive violence. His
expansive definition, that Violence is present when human beings are being
influenced so that their actual somatic and mental realizations are below their
potential realizations,2 enables an account of violence that extends beyond the
personal to include structural and cultural sources of such violence. It is the goal
of this symposium to continue this extension, to sharpen our analysis, and to
reflect on the utility (and limits) of thinking about structural violence as a
conceptual apparatus.
In Violence and Visibility, Yves Winter introduces a temporal critique to
Galtungs account, identifying how the fact of violence over time is intimately
linked to the ways in which we can perceive it at all. Galtungs structural account,
Winter notes, relies heavily on the language of invisibility, and it assumes that the
persistence of structural violence over time and across generations is a function of
that invisibility. If only we could see such violence, Galtung implies, we would
be able to stop it. Yet Winter identifies a deeper connection between visibility and
memory, between seeing violence and its repetition. Structural violences
invisibility is more likely because of violences ceaseless repetition in the open
rather than because it has been hidden away in a dark or subterranean place. It is
2

Yves Winter, Violence and Visibility, New Political Science 34:2 (2012), pp. 195 202, at
p. 168.

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Symposium: Revisiting Johan Galtungs Concept of Structural Violence 193

the normalcy of everyday violence, Winter argues, that enables it to be inherited
across generations, and that renders it invisible. This is a critical reversal of
Galtungs assumption that the invisibility of violence allows for repetition, instead
arguing that it is through repetition that violence becomes invisible. If this is the
case, then merely making violence visible again need not generate resistance to
it, and such visibility could even hasten its repetition. Our need for the language of
structural violence, then, is tempered by a corresponding concern to understand
the specific ways in which violence is repeated, reiterated, and redeployed over
time. A renewed attention to the idea of tragedy, Winter argues, might indeed help
us, in that tragedys way of rendering violence visible is exactly through noting
how it is inherited.
As noted above, there is something particular to our present moment that calls
for our renewed attention to structural violence: the advent of a distinctly new
liberal formation of late-modern capitalism, what has been identified widely as
neoliberalism. In Thomas Biebricher and Eric Vance Johnsons contribution,
Whats Wrong with Neoliberalism?,3 Galtungs theory of violence offers powerful
resources to account for what precisely is the matter with neoliberalism. By
presenting and noting the shortcomings of alternate critical approaches, they argue
that Galtungs oft forgotten account of structural violence can identify the harm of
neoliberalism: its profound violence in structural terms. Such violence, identifiable
at a structural level of the global and local distribution of resources, undermines
[neoliberalisms] foundational argument of the unencumbered individual.4 For
instance, the measurable and demonstrable fact of increasing income inequality,
which itself can be considered an indispensable part of a neoliberal social-economic
order, can be read as itself violence endemic to that system.
At the core of Antonio Vazquez-Arroyos paper, Orders of Violence:
Structures, Catastrophes, and Agents,5 is a similar question about the
relationship between the political and the economic as it is differentiated within
capitalist organization of production. Echoing Galtungs own targets (such as
market forces and imperialism), the paper identifies how the notion of the
catastrophe skews our notions of violent events within a narrow (and limited)
temporal logic. What we fail to see, so often in capitalism and colonialism, is the
way in which they function as permanent and on-going catastrophes, as forms of
violence that persist and reach far beyond punctuated events. This, he argues,
might enable us to rethink the foundations and forestall the exploitation of such
moments by those who would seek to retrench their own power and authority.
This requires us to find a way to apply the concept of the catastrophe to
something that does not have a discrete moment.
Joan Cockss paper, The Violence of Structures and the Violence of
Foundings,6 asks how Galtungs categories of direct, structural, and cultural
violence elide foundational violence, including the foundational violence of
seemingly peaceful processes such as treaties or contracts. Cocks pushes past
3
Thomas Biebricher and Eric Vance Johnson, Whats Wrong with Neoliberalism?,
New Political Science 34:2 (2012), pp. 202216.
4
Ibid., 207.
5
Antonio Vazquez-Arroyo, Orders of Violence: Structures, Catastrophes, and
Agents, New Political Science 34:2 (2012), pp. 211 221.
6
Joan Cocks, The Violence of Structures and the Violence of Foundings, New Political
Science 34:2 (2012), pp. 221 227.

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194 Yves Winter et al.

Galtungs own account, arguing that while his taxonomy of violence is important
for understanding the present yet invisible violence of background conditions, it
may nevertheless miss and impede an analysis of the secret and transparent
violence that occurs when a new order of things comes into being.7 Pointing to the
American Indian Treaty system, Cocks shows how foundational violence may
establish political communities through a form of violence that operates precisely
through iconic liberal forms. Contracts, deliberation, and promises of friendship
and harmony, she argues, are sometimes not the counter to violence but the form
that violence takes.8 Following Galtung, inequality is rightly recognized as one
expression of ongoing structural violence, but even the most egalitarian of
democracies might be founded in and through violence against prior modes of life.
Nothing, Cocks warns us, in the most democratic idea of a people prohibits it
from obliterating a reality . . . incompatible with its ethos and aspirations.9
As we struggle to find words to describe the violence that structures our lives,
the violence of individual actors and agents of the state, and the violence that
founds not only ideological movements but nations themselves, a return to
Galtungs work is not only helpful, but necessary. In particular, his accounts of
structural and cultural violence should not be read as a dismissal of more
obvious or punctuated instances of violence caused by specific individuals.
Personal violence, Galtung reminds us, is still very much a moment in which the
actual realizations of the human target of that violence are below their potential
realizations. If anything, Galtungs account can bolster our ability to hold violent
actors responsible for their actions. Moreover, it also pushes us to seek more
thoughtful analyses of those instances of personal violence as well as the
structural and cultural forms of violence that also are at work.
Such a thoughtfulness, exemplified in the papers collected in this symposium,
each grappling with understanding the violence of political foundations,
economic orders, catastrophes, and tragic repetition, is all the more apparent in
some of Galtungs most recent words on the matter. Galtungs granddaughter, Ida
Galtung, was attending the Workers Youth League camp on the morning of July
22, 2011 on the Norwegian island of Utya. While she survived the mass
shooting by Anders Brevik, Galtung spoke about his granddaughters experience
several days later. This act of personal, direct, and horrific violence was, in both
Galtungs and his granddaughters account, only the most visible and
punctuated aspect of the event. Any account of Breviks actions, Galtung insisted,
must be only a part of the account, and must not fall into the lazy mistakes of
analysis that halt thought, exploration, and critique. As he put it, I dont use the
word terrorist. Thats an American vocabulary, which has found much too
much usage. Its a sign saying, Stop thinking. Hes just simply bad and evil.10
We would do well to follow his own example, and continue to think,
critique, and build upon his work to help imagine how another world might be
possible.
7

Ibid., 222.
Ibid., 227.
9
Ibid.
10
Amy Goodman (interviewer), Norways Johan Galtung, Peace & Conflict Pioneer, on
How to Stop Extremism that Fueled Shooting, Democracy Now!, July 29, 2011, ,http://
www.democracynow.org/2011/7/29/norways_johan_galtung_peace_conflict_pioneer. .
8