WHY THIS BOOK

People in transitional societies aspire to realise the social, economic and political transformations that will address the causes and legacy of violent conflicts; and they expect that reconstruction programmes and post-conflict justice initiatives will help them to achieve these transformations. However, civil society actors working towards this end witness, with dismay, that these efforts predominantly focus on immediate statebuilding objectives, and too often miss valuable opportunities to address the discrimination and other structural factors that underlie conflict and threaten sustainable peace. For instance, post-conflict violence is frequently approached from the point of view of political fragility, or as a by-product of impunity for human rights violations perpetrated during violent times. While these factors may partially explain post-conflict violence, serious efforts to correct gender, ethnic and socio-economic discrimination – as well as poverty and other deeply-rooted inequalities surrounding or causing the conflicts – are rarely viewed as priorities in reconstruction and transitional agendas.

Structural violence, a concept coined in the field of peace research, contributes an important dimension to the objective of asserting equality and social justice during and after conflicts. Deeply embedded inequalities and discrimination very often pre-exist and exacerbate acts of direct violence against the poorest and most marginalised, and these inequalities translate into new forms of violence in the aftermath. The concept of structural violence was formulated by Johan Galtung in 1969, and has since been expanded to encompass the factors embedded in the organisation and mechanisms of societies that oppress the agency of individuals, causing them harm and suffering. This type of violence is ‘built into the structure and shows up as unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances’. In the context of peace research, Galtung underscored that both direct and structural violence can result in physical and psychological violence; that although direct violence can be more easily perceived, this should not lead to the assumption that structural violence inflicts less suffering than direct or physical violence. More recently, Paul Farmer, world-renowned physician and medical anthropologist, powerfully argued that, ‘human rights violations are not accidents.’