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THINKING BEYOND DIRECT VIOLENCE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 April 2014

Asher Kaufman
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Extract

The thought-provoking roundtable on “theorizing violence” in the November 2013 issue of IJMES paid much attention to different manifestations of physical violence. This is the type of violence that as early as 1969 Johan Galtung, one of the founders of the field of peace studies, termed direct violence, distinguishing it from other forms of violence, to which I will refer below. Direct violence, Galtung noted, is related to “somatic incapacitation, or deprivation of health, alone (with killing as the extreme form), at the hands of an actor who intends this to be the consequence.” According to Galtung, direct violence is physically manifested, it is related to a discernible event, and it has to involve a perpetrator and a purpose.

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International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 2: Politics of Benevolence , May 2014 , pp. 441 - 444
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

NOTES

Author's note: My thanks to the IJMES editors, whose comments on this piece helped me sharpen my arguments.

1 Galtung, Johan, “Violence, Peace and Peace Research,” Journal of Peace Research 6 (1969): 168CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Emphasis in original text.

2 Galtung, Johan, “Cultural Violence,” Journal of Peace Research 27 (1990): 291–305CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Boulding, Kenneth, “Twelve Friendly Quarrels with Johan Galtung,” Journal of Peace Research 14 (1977): 75–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Farmer, Paul, “On Suffering and Structural Violence: A View from Below,” Daedalus 125 (Winter 1996): 263Google Scholar. See also idem, “An Anthropology of Structural Violence” and “Structural Violence and Clinical Medicine,” in Partner to the Poor: A Paul Farmer Reader, ed. Haun Saussy (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2010).

5 See, for example, Ghanim, David, Gender and Violence in the Middle East (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2009)Google Scholar.

6 Nixon, Rob, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 2.

7 Ibid., 3.

8 See, for example, Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Uvin, Peter, Aiding Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda (Hartford, Conn.: Kumarian Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Bourgois, Phillipe, In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Tetreault, Mary Ann et al., eds., Rethinking Global Political Economy: Emerging Essays, Unfolding Odysseys (New York: Routledge, 2003)Google Scholar; and Alexander, Michelle, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

9 Zaru, Jean, Occupied with Nonviolence: A Palestinian Woman Speaks (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 2008)Google Scholar.