The challenge of structural violence

Every day and in every country around the world people are harmed, and robbed of their life chances, by social structures and institutions. Their lives are cut short or limited by ill health. The Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung, who died earlier this year aged 93, introduced the term “structural violence” to describe this phenomenon in his 1969 article “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research.”12 Spending his early teens under Nazi occupation, and disgusted by war, Galtung discovered that while endless effort had been devoted to the study of armed conflict, there was no equivalent that aimed to understand the creation and maintenance of peace.In founding the discipline of peace studies, he set out two concepts: negative peace, defined as the absence of direct violence (the application of physical force), and positive peace, the presence of social justice, where social structures and institutions no longer cause harm to individuals. A third, related…
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