In peace studies and peacebuilding, we're
focused on violent conflict. But we don't
only deal with violence the way you
think of it. There's a Norwegian peace
scholar named Johan Galtung. He kind of
made peace studies official as an
academic subject.
He says there's three kinds of violence:
1) direct violence, which is what you know
of. But he also says there's 2) structural
violence and 3) cultural violence.
Structural violence means systems and
practices in a society that harm people
in other ways: discrimination or
exclusion, or unfair treatment on the
basis of who you are. Cultural violence
means patterns of thinking or world
views that put me against you in some way.
Not only that, but I think I'm more
right and justified and innocent
than you you are.
Racism; sexism; my religion is right and
yours isn't; all sorts of world views that
justify why direct violence or
structural violence isn't totally out of
place. Someone asked me: Why do you call
it structural VIOLENCE? Why don't you
just call it discrimination or injustice?
That's a great question. Using the
terminology of violence calls our
attention, because it's such a strong
word, that something's wrong.
Something needs to be addressed. Hmm I don't know,
that's a little bit of a stretch.
Just because some group says that something is unfair doesn't mean objectively
that's true. My response to that would be:
You may be correct; I don't know.
When we're dealing with conflict,
who's objectively correct and who isn't
plays a smaller role than you would
think. Even if some people see a
situation totally differently, there's
still a conflict happening here. And we
collectively can do more to improve that
situation. That's why this is important.
I wonder if you can think of examples of
structural or cultural violence that
drive people to become divided, to resent
each other, to hate and ultimately feel
and act violently towards each other.
It's all around us every day in the
newspaper. So I believe these issues are
very important to tune into. And seeing
it through the lens of violence is one
way to do that. Thank you for watching.
