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As far as the war-peace continuum that is referred to
throughout this basic course is concerned, violence or aggression forms one of the core criteria for making a
distinction. Violent discharge of conflict is on the left-hand side of the
continuum, while peaceful conflict resolution is on the right-hand, or peaceful side of the
continuum. But what does it actually mean, when someone says that conflicts are being discharged using
violence? If we're talking about a war as a way of discharging a conflict, then the situation is relatively
straightforward. Things start to get more difficult, however, as we move further from war as the outermost point of the continuum on the left towards the turning point in the
center, that is, the civilization of the conflict.
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Violence is a phenomenon that is neither
defined clearly nor differentiated between in science or in everyday usage. When violence is mentioned in the media, it is usually referring to one of the
following aspects of violence:
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Violent crime (robbery and murder), which is far more frequent in large cities and nine times more likely to be carried out by men; |
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Vandalism: the deliberate destruction of property; |
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Rioting: violent disturbance at pop concerts, football matches or other mass events; |
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xenophobic violence: targeted violence against a particular section of society; |
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violence between street gangs: violent exchanges between rival gangs of youths; |
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politically motivated violence. |
[Author: Günther Gugel, Seminar Gewaltprävention, Institut für Friedenspädagogik Tübingen, 2003]
Violence is obvious when it is expressed as direct physical aggression that kills or injures another
person. In contrast, however, when the high-energy-using, consumption-driven economies of the
industrialized nations cause the Earth's atmosphere to warm and sea-levels to
rise, which, in turn, causes the flooding of small islands and takes away the ability for the people living on the islands to live, this is
unlikely to be referred to as violence. And it is for this reason that research into peace and conflict has tried to develop a more wider understanding of
violence:
"At the end of the 60s Johan Galtung introduced the distinction between personal and structural violence into the
discussion, supplementing this still further during the early 90s with cultural
violence. In the case of personal violence, the victim and offender can be clearly identified and classified. While structural violence also creates
victims, they are not individuals but specific organizational or social
structures. This is the fault of the way in which people live. Cultural violence is used to describe
ideologies, convictions, traditions and systems of legitimation, with whose help direct or structural violence is made
possible, justified and, indeed, legitimated. According to Galtung, it's fair to talk about violence when people are influenced in such a way as to make the realization of their actual physical and spiritual state less than
that which would otherwise be possible ."
[Taken from: Günther Gugel, Seminar Gewaltprävention, Institut für Friedenspädagogik Tübingen, 2003]
Galtung's understanding of structural violence is a core point of reference for the international academic discussion on peace and
conflict. This understanding has been met with a great deal of approval since it opens up the concept of violence and allows the violent results
(starvation in the Third World) of anonymous structures to be examined. It has,
however, also been sharply criticized because it has inflated the use of the term
violence. This makes it easy to describe international injustices as structural violence as a way of
denouncing them. |
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"Violence" as a definition of a social circumstance encompassing a range of action possibilities should today be understood as a key concept for any discussion on war and peace - because we define „war“ as the use of
organized military aggression between different social groups and „peace“ as the absence of war in a minimum
definition. Violence in this context, however, represents only one part of the wide understanding of the term
violence. In this sense, we are talking about direct physical violence that injures people and damages
property. Direct or physical violence is used to describe social circumstances in which their is a clear relationship between subject and
object. Violence is perpetrated by an offender (subject), violence is suffered by a victim
(object). (...)
In more recent (...) usage, the term violence has been moving more and more towards being understood as physical violence. This statement is only valid, however, provided that we interpret „violence“ as an action that is linked to direct or physical force, as a concept that is used to describe the actions of people that can be clearly identified. In contrast to this, Karl Marx drew attention to the fact that violence itself can be founded in social conditions and that they pervade in a manifest or latent way all political and social relationships within certain state and social systems. Violence that cannot be followed back to actions of concrete individuals and that have much more to do with the totality of institutional violence within a society can be identified as structural violence. From this point of view, the term violence is transformed from a concrete form of action into a (society) structural principle.
[Taken from: Reinhard Meyers: Grundbegriffe, Strukturen und theoretische Perspektiven der Internationalen Beziehungen, in: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (Hrsg.): Grundwissen Politik, 2. Aufl., Bonn 1993, p. 280-282] |
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Further ideas on how to define and deal with the term violence:
"The intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or deprivation."
[WHO (World Health Organisation) definition of violence, taken from: World report on violence and health, Geneva 2002, p. 5] |
[Author: Ragnar Müller]
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