Abstract

In this project, I develop an alternative account of structural violence. I am navigating between two approaches to violence. On the one hand, we have the narrow, restricted approach to violence, where violence is construed as direct, intentional, and forceful acts done by particular agents to others, which cause harms and injuries to those people. On the other hand, Johan Galtung develops an extended approach to violence which overcomes the limitations of this restrictive approach by recognizing and theorizing violence outside of intentional, direct activity. He defines violence as avoidable impediments and obstacles blocking people from actualizing their own potential realizations. ;Given the overly broad scope of Galtung's conception of violence, his mechanistic account of the relationship between structures and human activity, and his reduction of structural violence to distributions of power, I formulate an alternative approach to structural violence. First, I retain a link to restrictive approaches---emphasizing violence as bodily harm and injury---which provides us with a clear target for political action designed to recognize and confront relations of violence while also relying upon an understanding of violence beyond direct, intentional activity. Second, I develop a dialectical understanding of the relationship between social structures and human activity, whereby the quality of agency of subordinate and dominant groups affects those social structures organizing social activity. Structures are the outcomes of antagonistic relations . While structures condition, shape, constrain, or block certain kinds of social activity we can also recognize, unlike Galtung, that the choices and actions of subordinate groups in turn affects the very organizations of relations themselves. Depending upon the degree of self-conscious, collectively organized activity designed to meet the interests of subordinate groups, these groups can change and resist structural arrangements which do not serve their interests. Third, rejecting Galtung's understanding of power as a resource, the exercise of power by particular groups does in certain instances block or make possible, or highly likely, outcomes of violence. Also, violence functions as a precondition or instrument for the exercise of power. In order to clarify this relationship, I detail the distinct, but nevertheless close, interrelationships between exploitation, domination and structural violence