Revisiting structural violence: Galtung’s legacy and power relations
December 1st, 2024
The essay “Revisiting structural violence: Galtung’s legacy and power relations” has been published in Scienza e Pace (Vol. 15, No. 2, 2024), a thematic issue devoted to “Johan Galtung: life, works, legacy.”
The article offers a critical re-examination of Johan Galtung’s concept of structural violence, a foundational idea in the field of peace studies yet often challenged for its vagueness. The author addresses this weakness by bringing Galtung’s theoretical framework into dialogue with Foucault’s notion of the “state of domination,” understood as a arrangement of power relations that radically constrain individual freedom and perpetuate injustice and oppression.
From this interpretive lens emerges a more rigorous definition of structural violence: not simply an unequal distribution of power, but a condition of domination that narrows spaces of freedom and entrenches systemic inequalities. This perspective also allows for a reconsideration of Galtung’s violence triangle, highlighting the links between structural dynamics and manifestations of direct violence.
The contribution thus positions itself within contemporary debates on post-conflict transformative justice, offering conceptual tools to deepen our understanding of the mechanisms that sustain large-scale violence and to design more effective and lasting strategies for peace.
The article, together with the entire volume, is freely accessible on the journal’s website.