Avoidable harm to people’s well-being produced by social arrangements, with no single actor carrying it out (Galtung 1969).
Extended definition
Johan Galtung defined violence as present “when human beings are being influenced so that their actual somatic and mental realizations are below their potential realizations,” and added that “when the actual is unavoidable, then violence is not present” (1969, p. 168). Structural violence is the form with no identifiable actor; it shows up “as unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances” (p. 171).
The wiki reads the definition as a test with two conditions: a shortfall in well-being that can be shown, and evidence that the shortfall could have been avoided. Both must hold before a page calls an arrangement structural violence. The definition has critics. C.A.J. Coady argues that personal and structural violence share too little for one word to cover both, and that the wide definition defeats its own ends. Howson (2018) applies the term to exclusion of farmers and laborers from the benefits of a REDD+ carbon project.
Contrast with adjacent terms
- Conservation violence. Harm done in the name of protecting nature, usually by an identifiable agency. Structural violence needs no agent.
- Slow violence. Rob Nixon’s term (2011) for environmental harm that accumulates out of sight over time. Structural violence concerns the gap in life chances, whatever its pace.
Related terms
Sources
- Galtung, J. (1969). Violence, Peace, and Peace Research
- Howson, P. (2018). Slippery Violence in the REDD+ Forests of Central Kalimantan, Indonesia
- Nixon, R. (2011). Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
Provenance
Created 25 October 2026 from the evidence brief behind Exclusion from Water Finance. The definition follows the cited author’s published wording; the paragraph on the wiki’s use is the wiki’s own reading.