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Universities and, more broadly, higher education institutions (HEIs), need to use the knowledge they produce and their education of new professionals, to help solve some of the world´s greatest problems, as addressed by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set out by the United Nations (UN). Humanity is facing unprecedented challenges, most strikingly so in relation to climate change and loss of nature and biodiversity, as well as inequality, health, the economy, and a suite of issues related to the 2030 Agenda. Given this new reality in which the future of humans, along with other species, is at stake, it is time for HEIs and their stakeholders to systematically rethink their role in society and their key missions, and reflect on how they can serve as catalysts for a rapid, urgently needed and fair transition towards sustainability. The complexity of the issues at stake means that solutions should be part of a radical agenda that calls for new alliances and new incentives.

It is also time for HEIs to make sustainability and SDG literacy core requisites for all faculty members and students. Sustainability education should bring students into contact with real-world problems and immersive experiences. Appreciating the greater good of both people and planet, and contributing to values beyond mere monetary gain will further enthuse and inspire students and faculty mentors alike. Ultimately, the educational culture at universities and HEIs needs to encourage students to learn via experimentation and critical thinking from multiple perspectives.

(Veronique de Rugy, PhD in economics from the Panthéon-Sorbonne University, George Gibbs Chair in Political Economy and Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and a nationally syndicated columnist, “Debt and Growth: A Decade of Studies,” pg online @ https://www.mercatus.org/research/policy-briefs/debt-and-growth-decade-studies //um-ef)

A further cost resulting from increased government borrowing is the crowding out of public investment as growing interest payments consume an ever larger portion of the federal budget, leaving lesser amounts of public investment for research and development, infrastructure, and education. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicts that by 2049, the cost of paying the interest on the nation’s debt will be the third-largest budgetary item after Social Security and Medicare, constituting almost 6 percent of GDP. The combination of reduced private investment and crowding out of public investment will have negative effects on social mobility as Americans find it harder to buy a home, finance a car, or pay for college. Reduced investment, lower productivity, and declining social mobility will continue to drive down the growth potential of the economy.

Zoë, October. “Equitable Economic Recovery Is a National Security Imperative”, in Domestic and International (Dis)Order: A Strategic Response, Ed. Bitounis and King, October 2020, p. 89-90

Broadly shared economic prosperity is a bedrock of America’s economic and political strength—both domestically and in the international arena. A strong and equitable recovery from the economic crisis created by COVID-19 would be a powerful testament to the resilience of the American system and its ability to create prosperity at a time of seismic change and persistent global crisis. Such a recovery could attack the profound economic inequities that have developed over the past several decades. Without bold action to help all workers access good jobs as the economy returns, the United States risks undermining the legitimacy of its institutions and its international standing. The outcome will be a key determinant of America’s national security for years to come.

Venture capital in the U.S. is said to be society‘s essential technology gatekeeper, one that has helped to create waves of technological innovation that have transformed both industries and society at large. Prominent companies that VCs have supported include Google, E-bay, Amazon, Intel, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, Medtronic, Home Depot, Starbucks, Federal Express, and Whole Foods. In particular it is argued that the high tech companies in which venture capitalists have invested such as semiconductors, personal computers, biotechnology, software, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence have created spillovers that have established new industries, revitalized economies, and benefited society as a whole (Florida and Kenney, 1988). Gompers and Lerner (1999, 2001a, 2001b) have argued that up to a third of the total market value of all public companies in the U.S. has been created by VCs. Their data show that a very high percentage of startups that have the aspiration to become major businesses do not attract VC funding and fail within three years.

VCs fund highly innovative ideas that may threaten established products and services. The ideas that they fund are outside the mold of the ideas that banks typically finance. If entrepreneurial firms fail banks do not have sufficient hard assets to hold as collateral and repossess. A lack of funding is generally viewed as a major barrier to the progress that entrepreneurial firms otherwise could make (Amit, Brander, & Zott, 1998; Bygrave, 2004). VCs are supposed to remove this barrier. Without their funding the entrepreneurial firms could fail. They would begin small and remain so or take far longer to become big, even if their businesses were based on innovations with high growth potential. Without VC funding, entrepreneurial firms would not have the wherewithal to grow their businesses and diffuse their technologies on a wide-scale enough basis to provide the full benefits of which they are capable of providing to themselves and society. They would lack the resources, for instance, to hire the staff they need and to do the product development that is necessary for them to achieve market growth. If their technologies and business models show enough promise, they cannot rely just on the capital of their founders and the founders‘ early backers and profits earned from early activities to expand rapidly and boost the scale of their operations.

Investment Crowd Out. As debt grows, it also crowds out private investments. When the government borrows money, it does so from the public and businesses. Increasingly, savings purchase Treasury securities instead of going towards productive capital investments like startups and other businesses, research and development, and new technologies. Even assuming possible benefits from increased federal borrowing, such as when the government makes effective public investments in public health or national security, debt crowd‐​out results in lower economic output and incomes.

In 2019, CBO estimated the economic effects of high and rising debt under several scenarios. Compared to CBO’s alternative baseline scenario, stabilizing the debt at 2019 levels would result in gross national product (GNP) being $2.7 trillion higher by 2049. That’s an increase of $7,000 per person. Reducing the publicly held debt (the debt the United States has borrowed from credit markets) to 42 percent of GDP would result in GNP being $3.5 trillion or $8,900 per capita higher.

(Daniel, “Startup Surge Stood Firm Against Economic Headwinds in 2022,” pg online @ https://eig.org/2022-business-formation/ //um-ef)

Nearly 1.7 million applications for businesses likely to hire employees were filed in 2022—a 27.8 percent increase over the prepandemic baseline—and the second largest total on record. Including businesses that are not likely to employ others, the number of new business applications filed by Americans totaled 5.1 million. The annual pace of filings cooled by a modest 6.5 percent relative to 2021’s record surge. Monthly totals largely held steady over the year at an average of 137,600 per month, signaling that business formation may be settling into a new, significantly higher baseline relative to prepandemic. The national surge in business formation since 2020 has been led by a handful of industries, including transportation and warehousing; accommodation and food services; health care and social assistance; and retail trade. Applications in these industries remained elevated in 2022, while numbers fell back towards or below prepandemic levels for several others. The business formation gains extend across every state to varying degrees, led by Southern states as well as the traditional incorporation hubs of Wyoming and Delaware. Introduction Business formation remained exceptionally strong in 2022 despite economic headwinds from inflation and lingering supply chain issues. Nearly 1.7 million applications to form new businesses likely to hire employees were filed in 2022—the second most of any year on record. This figure represented a 27.8 percent increase from 2019, reflecting how the pandemic jumpstarted a prolonged and unprecedented period of business formation across the United States. When including businesses not likely to employ others, last year’s total climbs to 5.1 million applications, based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Business Formation Statistics (BFS). This dataset provides a timely and forward-looking indicator of economic activity. Even though recession concerns are mounting, the country’s entrepreneurial resurgence appeared robust heading into the new year. To be sure, it takes time for an application for a new Employer Identification Number (or EIN, the underlying variable tracked here) to actually turn into a new business, and only a fraction of applications typically complete the journey. But the durability of the surge suggests that it is capturing a true renaissance in entrepreneurial activity across the United States after the pandemic upended many pillars of the economy. Here we highlight several major takeaways for business formation that defined 2022. We focus on applications from likely employers, and most comparisons are made relative to 2019 in order to explicitly highlight how the pandemic-era economy has dramatically differed from prior trends. Likely employer business applications were up nearly 28 percent relative to before the pandemic, although down slightly from the 2021 peak. Americans filed nearly 1.7 million applications to start new likely employer businesses in 2022. These applications—labeled “high propensity applications” by the Census Bureau—make up a subset of total business applications, capturing those with a higher likelihood of hiring employees in the future based on their industry or other information in the filing. Over the course of the year, there were 359,000 more filings from likely employers in 2022 than in 2019—a 27.8 percent increase over the prepandemic baseline. While 2022’s count was 6.5 percent lower than 2021’s, it still ranked as the second largest haul of the series. These applications are particularly noteworthy because they represent the businesses most likely to lead to lasting job growth and innovation, if and when they become operational. Monthly business formation rates held steady over the year. Despite the modest year-over-year drop, 2022 was not a period of continuous decline presaging a downward drift in applications or a recession. Rather, the number of applications showed remarkable stability on a monthly basis over the course of the year—filings averaged around 137,600 per month after adjusting for seasonal variations, or about 30,000 higher than in the year before the pandemic. On a year-over-year basis, the number of business applications filed in December 2022 was nearly equal to the number filed in December 2021. Amid supply chain disruptions, threats from inflation, and concerns about a coming recession that plagued much of the economy, the steadiness in application levels exhibited over the course of 2022 offers optimism that the pandemic may have delivered a lasting, positive shock to American entrepreneurship. All together, more than 4.5 million applications to form likely employer businesses have been filed since the onset of the pandemic, and more than 14 million applications when including solo enterprises and likely non-employers. The national boom in applications is supported by a continued strength in several large sectors even as others revert to prepandemic levels or below. The modest but virtually across-the-board cooling in applications saw counts fall back to earth in certain industries even as they remain high in others. Almost three years on, applications remain most elevated in several industries that were highly disrupted by the pandemic. Even in 2022, new likely employer business applications stood well above 2019 levels in transportation and warehousing (+51 percent), accommodation and food services (+50 percent), health care and social assistance (+32 percent), and retail trade (+29 percent). New businesses are still in the pipeline in these sectors, implying that their adaptation to a new normal continues. The pandemic-era boom in business applications has mostly faded among some other industries, however. Likely employer business applications in the manufacturing, information, and arts and entertainment industries all ended 2022 less than 10 percent above prepandemic levels. Likely employer filings fell below 2019 totals in the educational services, wholesale trade, and agricultural industries last year, all of which generally saw less of a boom in 2021 than others. In the end, out of the 19 major industry sectors that comprise the BFS data, 11 ended 2022 significantly above 2019 levels, four approached 2019 levels (less than 10 percent above), and four were at or below prepandemic levels. Primarily Southern states led the nation in application growth. Likely employer applications closed out 2022 above prepandemic levels in every state. The South as a whole led the nation, where filings were up by more than one-third over 2019 levels. By comparison, the Northeast saw the smallest regional increase of only 20 percent over the same period. At the state level, Wyoming (+76 percent) and Delaware (+69 percent) have long been preferred states for business incorporation and have led the nation in growth during the pandemic, as well. Three other states that surpassed a 50 percent jump in applications—Mississippi (+67 percent), Alabama (+53 percent), and South Carolina (+51 percent)—are all in the Southeast. Elsewhere, states that experienced more modest increases in business applications in 2020 and 2021 ended last year closest to their prepandemic baselines, including Alaska (+5 percent), the District of Columbia (+5 percent), and Washington state (+13 percent). Economists are still trying to identify a unifying theory to explain why these leaders and the social and economic conditions are feeding into the surge in entrepreneurial activity in these places. For example, population growth could explain why the South leads in general, but not the leading states specifically. Were particular demographic groups especially likely to become entrepreneurs? (All three leading Southern states have large Black populations, a demographic that has seen strong growth in the number of active business owners, for example.) Were lower-income individuals more likely to self-incorporate? (All three leading Southern states have high poverty rates, too.) Might tax and other policy, regulatory, or state- or region-specific factors explain the trends? Or did their relative insulation from the initial outbreaks of COVID-19 position them best to ride the entrepreneurial wave that would come? The results are not in yet. It is also noteworthy that the explosion in business applications did not significantly reorder the ranking of top states in per capita terms over the course of the pandemic. Among the top ten states for likely employer applications per capita in 2019, all but one remained in the top ten in 2022. Only Mississippi (ranked 22nd in 2019) managed to crack the list, demoting Utah—traditionally a leader in startup activity given its economic orientation and rapid population growth. ​​ A promising development or an alluring mirage? The two big questions presented by these data are: how many of these new business applications will indeed turn into genuine employer enterprises, and how economically significant will they be? Answers to these questions will emerge over time. The first hint will come in the fall of 2023, when the Census Bureau releases authoritative counts and employment figures for the firms that started in 2021. Before then, we can extrapolate across related data to find corroborating evidence that the surge is real and significant. A look at data from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) that tracks the number of active, physical business locations largely supports the story in the BFS. In the two years prior to the pandemic, the total number of business establishments in the country increased by 4.8 percent. In the two years since (2020 Q2 to 2022 Q2), the number has risen by 10.7 percent, or more than twice as quickly. Just as in the business formation data, the South has also seen the largest increase in the number of actively operating business locations since the pandemic began. Some of these will be new branches of existing firms; others will be new enterprises altogether. Similarly, a recent paper by Ryan Decker and John Haltiwanger of the Federal Reserve and University of Maryland, respectively, find that trends in new business applications–especially new likely employer business applications–closely track trends in worker flows and new establishment openings, including across geographies. Another novel Census Bureau dataset looks at “single-unit firms,” or firms that have only one establishment (and therefore more timely data available), to find that the number of such firms in the economy reached all-time highs in the fourth quarter of 2020, after business applications began spiking that summer. In other words, the available evidence suggests that these trends are indicative of genuine entrepreneurial activity. Why do these questions matter? The economic significance of these business applications lies in what they signify is to come. Applications themselves are only paper, but historically a stable fraction of them go on to become genuine employer businesses (the “likely employer” subset studied here) on a relatively predictable timetable. These data therefore provide a very early signal of potential job growth in the works. Recent work by Jose Asturias and colleagues at the U.S. Census Bureau finds that historically, business applications are strongly predictive of changes in total U.S. payroll employment 11 months down the road—providing earlier insight into where the economy is headed than nearly any other principal economic indicator the federal government produces. Startups also play a critical role in fostering innovation and driving productivity advances. The surge in promising new business activity could then herald greater productivity growth and a healthier economy in the coming years, too. And as tech firms lead a cycle of layoffs among established enterprises, these startups could play a vital role absorbing displaced workers and preventing or shortening a jobs recession. However, questions remain about whether the nature of this economic indicator changed characteristically with the pandemic. Are more people filing business applications for enterprises with no aspirations to hire others? Might the newest cohort of firms in the pipeline start and stay smaller (with fewer employees) than prior ones? There is a person behind each application, too; are personal circumstances or preferences changing such that people are less likely to stick with the firms they formed in the depths of the pandemic as lives settle into new normals? We are not yet able to answer these questions. A final concern exists around survival. New businesses are notoriously vulnerable. Even in good years, roughly one out of every seven firms that are under five years old shut down; in bad years (e.g., 2009) the figure climbs towards one out of every five. Businesses that launch in recessions tend to be permanently scarred by them, too, starting smaller and experiencing lower growth trajectories than those that launch in better times. As the Federal Reserve continues tightening monetary policy and the probability of a recession rises, many of these new businesses—a significant chunk of which were likely founded by first-time entrepreneurs—may not survive. These concerns aside, the boost to entrepreneurship observed since 2020 and maintained through 2022 offers reason for optimism about the direction and future health of the economy. The nature and long-term impacts of the boom will become clearer over time, but this surge of supply-side experimentation suggests that the pandemic rekindled American economic dynamism at least to some extent—a silver lining worth nurturing with supportive policy.

Here it is important to note the role of the global economy. While our outwardly prosperous era has great potential, any deeper examination reveals that it is not placid by any measure. Many countries have been struggling with rising food costs, growing income and wealth inequality, and the global financial crisis and recession that generated widespread unemployment and impoverishment, all of which the recent global pandemic has worsened.101 The spread of democracy had an enormous effect in generating peace,102 but only because it came with the reduction of structural violence and of the behavioral violence it generates.103 As global capitalism and a system of privileges shortly followed, it became capable of offsetting the gains of democracy.104 As the exploitation, intimidation, and greed inherent in structural violence corrode the general health of society, we need to be mindful of an economic structure that reproduces oligarchies or authoritarian regimes even as it squanders the democratic principles it claims to espouse. Nurturing awareness of structural violence is critical for avoiding being caught in psychological exploitation. Capitalism markets to people the lure of becoming rich as it leaves large populations poorer and more defenseless. In an advanced economy such as the United States, the “consent” of the majority itself is manufactured105 with increasing psychological sophistication and social manipulation. And while material oppression is severe, none is more oppressive than the hijacking of the mind. When human development and actualization are stunted to the point where citizens become willing pawns for those in power, then ever-greater structural violence is possible. Maintaining this system may sometimes require mentally unsound leaders capable of tapping into the maladaptive defenses of the population, including White supremacy—one form of defense against feelings of inferiority. And the greater the need of the population to distract itself from reality, the more attractive it will find a leader with delusions about himself as omnipotent savior or with paranoid tendencies that offer easy scapegoats for one’s miseries.106 Enduring peace, therefore, is unachievable through the mere pacification of those who are suffering. American political scientist Quincy Wright rejected a simplistic, negative definition of peace as the mere absence of war in favor of a more positive definition that views peace as international justice and a spirit of cooperation.107 Galtung expanded this idea of a positive peace to include the social integration of human community through a more just distribution of power and resources.108 We can equate this notion of peace with concepts of nonviolence, whereby nonviolence is a state that is more than just the absence of violence.109 In structural violence, perpetuation of the status quo itself becomes a perpetration, but at the same time we are all capable of instituting change for the better, and the suffering can arouse the power of the people. There are hopeful signs in the midst of rising structural violence. While vulnerable groups are often the first to succumb to the kinds of behavioral violence that prevent personal, local, and national development, with critical consciousness, these weaknesses can be transformed into knowledge and power.110 Greater awareness of the need to defend vulnerable populations led to the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights, which animated the 50th anniversary celebrations of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and ultimately influenced the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. It has become possible to envision: a world of . . . equal opportunity permitting the full realization of human potential and contributing to shared prosperity. . . . One in which democracy, good governance and the rule of law as well as an enabling environment at national and international levels, are essential for sustainable development.111 Indeed, this vision has become mandatory if humanity is to survive beyond the immediate future. Structural violence is human-made, and the positive aspect of this is that it can be human-corrected. As daunting as the deeper structures of human violence may seem, a more profound understanding is possible and, with it, more enduring solutions. The common roots of our problems reveal how early, preventive measures can lead to widespread results that allow for global human thriving. Hence, recognizing the abyss and fully understanding it gives us a greater capacity for solutions. Awareness helps us to decide on policies that reduce all forms of violence at the structural level, with vast reductions of suffering at a very small cost. What we gain psychologically should not be underestimated: Social solidarity, or a feeling of participation, connection, and belonging would resolve many problems, including the divisions we create over cohesion and meaning. As American Reformed theologian Reinhold Niebuhr noted, and as American philosopher Cornell West echoed, justice is how love takes expression in public.112 When we can locate the source of our collective suffering in ourselves and learn to recognize and refuse the violence before it takes root everywhere in all forms, we can then begin to transform our world.

We must first discuss the extinction of populations and make clear the sharp contrast with the notion of species’ extinction. What is the extinction or disruption of a population? Because we said that a population is an individual, we should try to understand a population’s extinction in comparison with individual death. This will be done with the help of the examples and discussion on death presented by in Biological individuality. – A population could go extinct with the death of all its members. Here, the extinction is the ‘death’ of the population, understood as the final death of an individual. – A population could go extinct with the cessation of all effective relations between the members of the population (as when the organisms of one population are dispatched in many other populations). We are clearly in the situation described by , of a functional extinction. But, is the population ‘dead’? Yes, but in the sense that its life has been ‘suspended’ as writes. This situation is the analog for populations as cryptobiosis for organisms (). The individual remains numerically and materially the same, however without relations. The population can live again if the relations are recreated between the same individuals. A population can thus go extinct in dying by disruption on two levels (intra-organismic and inter-organismic) and can, in the latter case, be brought again to life as long as it still exists numerically. But a population cannot be recreated after the extinction due to the ‘disruptive’ death of its members as in the first case. Clones recreated from the genomes of the last members of the population would be other organisms and thus the population of clones would be another population. Thus we end up with two different ‘degrees’ of populations’ ‘death’. Concerning species, we have already described four modalities of extinction at the beginning of this article, and yet we present below what we call three ‘degrees’ of conceptual extinction. The first is the ‘objective’ extinction degree when the species becomes a null class (whether by phyletic or non-phyletic extinction). The second degree of extinction, made possible by the artificial creation of clones from entire genomes, concerns the extinction of genetic information coming from the members of the species. As long as we can expect for technical reasons that a member of an extinct species can be recreated, we can say that the species is ‘virtually non-extinct’ or ‘potentially non-extinct’ to refer to the Aristotelian vocabulary. Here the natural telos is of course replaced by a human and technical finality. The third and last degree of extinction is related to the extinction of the meaning of the species. More than organisms or genomes waiting to be saved to alleviate human shame, species have their own signification and existence as primary members of our perceptive, cognitive and symbolic universe. A species would thus go extinct (for us) in the sense that it existed as an abstract category (‘good to think with’, as , demonstrated) and disappeared from our understanding with the loss of information and representation about this species. This is probably the kind of extinction to which Lyell was sensitive when he spoke of the dodo, like Strickland, Lyell’s contemporary, a great ornithologist who was the first to write an entire book on the dodo and who sought consolation in this view of the naturalist’s duty: ‘It is, therefore, the duty of the naturalist to preserve to the stores of science the knowledge of these extinct or expiring organisms, when he is unable to preserve their lives; so that our acquaintance with the marvels of animal and vegetable existence may suffer no detriment by the losses which the organic creation seems destined to sustain’ (). To fight against this kind of extinction, the disappearance of a species as an abstract or a virtual category, is also a way to protect traditional cultures as their interpretation of the world and their means of maintaining memory of the past are supported by the natural categories ().

The extinction of species has always been the most dramatic threat to biodiversity. Consequently, in the last decades ecologists and conservationists have focused more and more attention on this phenomenon. Scientific research has produced outstanding work regarding the explanation of causes, mechanisms and consequences of extinctions of anthropic origin. Specialists in conservation biology have developed new concepts (Population Viability Analysis, for example, Minimum Viable Population) and new multidisciplinary approaches. Thanks to such models, they can anticipate future rates of extinction with increasing certainty (). Above all, these models allow us to be aware that without human efforts, more and more species will be driven to extinction in the years to come. Hence, ecologists have formulated recommendations that are based on technical and ecological criteria and relate to species (and ecosystems) deserving special efforts to save (). However, few previous studies have sought to define the nature of extinction precisely. Most biologists accept the following basic definition: “The end, the loss of existence, the disappearance of a species or the ending of a reproductive lineage”. It would also seem that the notion of ‘extinction’ designates both a recognised fact (e.g. ‘the extinction of the dinosaurs’) and a process in progress (e.g. ‘the extinction of populations of gorillas’). Yet, what is still missing is an in-depth analysis of the nature of extinction, an ontological analysis, so to speak, that would enlighten us in our quest for ethical norms that would ensure the conservation of endangered species. We would like to demonstrate here that a detailed study of the definitions, the criteria and the modalities of extinction will reveal many shortcomings in contemporary philosophy of ecology and evolution. Our analysis will be structured according to two principal concepts that are at the core of the notion of extinction: ‘death’ and ‘species’. We will then be led to present the ontological distinction that we establish between biological entities irrespective of whether they are real, abstract or virtual, and the ethical consequences of this system.

The Economic Value of Peace framework covers 163 countries and independent territories - representing 99.5 per cent of the global economy and population. There are at least two major trends in the cost of violence. Firstly, where countries have experienced dramatic increases in violent conflict, there is a corresponding impact on their economies. The primary example of this is the case of Syria where the civil war has devastated the country and economy, with violence and conflict costs equivalent to 54.1 per cent of GDP in 2015. Conversely, countries that have achieved peace have reaped significant economic gains. The economic impact of violence in Sri Lanka has decreased 66 per cent since 2009, resulting in a peace dividend of $48 billion PPP, which is equivalent to 20 per cent of the country’s 2015 GDP. Through understanding the economic losses caused by violence and which types of violence have the greatest effect on Positive Peace indicators, governments and policymakers can better understand how a lack of peace is affecting not only economic growth but also poverty levels, social mobility, education, the control of corruption or life expectancy. Indeed, results from the 2016 iteration of the PPI show that the average score across these indicators were much higher in the top ten ranked countries than the bottom ten ranked. This highlights that by identifying the right violence containment strategies, policymakers may be able to lower economic costs of violence by nurturing the tangible drivers of peacefulness.

In addition to the absence of violence, Positive Peace is also associated with many other societal characteristics that are considered desirable, including better economic outcomes, measures of wellbeing, levels of gender equality and environmental performance. IEP defines Positive Peace as the “attitudes, institutions and structures which create and sustain peaceful societies.” By providing a comprehensive taxonomy that breaks down into eight distinct but interdependent pillars, Positive Peace serves to facilitate the work of policymakers. It does so by identifying what makes some countries more peaceful than others, thereby highlighting why certain countries experience higher levels of violence - or political instability more generally. Positive Peace can also be used to define the risk of future falls in peace, thereby providing better targeting for peacebuilding efforts. Positive Peace has been empirically derived by IEP via the statistical analysis of thousands of cross-country measures of economic and social progress to determine what factors have a statistically significant association with the absence of violence. It is measured by the Positive Peace Index (PPI) which consists of 24 qualitative and quantitative indicators that capture the eight factors of Positive Peace. Covering 162 countries, or 99.5% of the world’s population the PPI provides a baseline measure of the effectiveness of a country’s capabilities to build and maintain peace. It also represents a tangible metric for policymakers, researchers and corporations to use for effective monitoring and evaluation purposes. One of Positive Peace’s value-adds is its applicability for empirically measuring a country’s resilience, or ability to absorb and recover from shocks. It can also be used to measure fragility and to help predict the likelihood of conflict, violence and instability. The eight factors of Positive Peace represent a complex set of interdependent social dynamics and as such are best thought of systemically. As an example, high levels of human capital can act as a driver of economic growth, while a strong business environment can be a driver of improved education. Analysis of corruption demonstrates that 80 per cent of countries scoring poorly in low levels of corruption also score poorly in high levels of human capital, highlighting the interconnected nature of the factors.

Peace is not just the absence of conflict. Positive peace is the presence of justice, equity and equality for all in our society, a lasting peace that addresses social and economic disparities and in turn the conflicts and violence associated with exploitation and inequality. The COVID-19 crisis has exacerbated the inequity and inequality that already existed before the pandemic and exposed weaknesses in societies across the Asia-Pacific. It is indisputable that the most vulnerable among us have been hardest hit, because of unequal access to health care and public health information, income-earning opportunities and learning resources, and also the fragile economic and social situations of people on the margins. This has very real impacts on our societies as a whole. Millions of learners, with an unequal impact on girls and women, have had their education disrupted because of the pandemic are at risk of never returning to school, with lifelong consequences for their own opportunities and also for their societies. Many more low-income families, including refugees and migrants, have lost their livelihoods, while at the same time facing the public crisis. We know that children who have been displaced from school face greater dangers of exploitation and domestic violence. For LGBTI people, indigenous communities, youth and many other vulnerable groups, the perils of the pandemic are compounded by pre-existing inequalities. COVID-19 has also made it starkly clear that we are all in this together. The overall resilience of countries and communities integrally and interconnectedly depends on the welfare of the most vulnerable. For all of the challenges posed by the pandemic, however, we also can see an opportunity to address and rebuild our relationship with the nature that promotes harmony between people and our planet. UN Secretary-General António Guterres has outlined the global UN response working with Member States and civil society to “build back better”, with a particular emphasis on addressing the climate crisis that is the long-term context for our present situation, and is already have visible effects from melting glaciers to rampant wildfires. The UN response involves every agency not only to combat the pandemic and lead public health efforts, but also to advise and support on economic stimulus and social protection programmes. At UNESCO Regional Bureau of Education in Asia and Pacific, we believe that quality and inclusive education is absolutely critical to move towards a peaceful and sustainable future in the region. At these times of crisis, we must have eyes on inventing mid-tem and long-term solutions for our future generations to equally enjoy living together between themselves and with nature in societies with positive peace. The Together for Peace (T4P) initiative launched virtually this week brings together Member States from across the region to work towards positive within and between countries and communities. The initiative is integral to the mandate of UNESCO, which was founded after World War II with the famous preamble of its constitution that since wars begin in the minds of men and women, it is in the minds of men and women that the defences of peace must be constructed. All of our work towards positive peace, however, depends on partnerships with government, civil society and members of the public. History has taught us that political and economic arrangements between governments are not enough to ensure sustainable and enduring peace. The support and solidarity from people coming from every segment of our societies is the only guarantee. We know we face considerable challenges in achieving that goal and building understanding and empathy between peoples. There are continuing conflicts within and between countries in the region, while narrow nationalistic narratives and disinformation continue to foster prejudice and misunderstanding. The inequalities separating people in our societies have often been widened by the pandemic. And the monumental test to mitigate the climate crisis once again will impact the most vulnerable groups first, although clearly it is a challenge that affects us all. Translating the principles of positive peace, which we can all agree on, into tangible facts on the ground requires input and partnerships between governments, but just as important we need buy in from members of the public and a commitment to better understand each other, celebrating our differences as well as our shared humanity. Education including social and emotional learning is critical – we literally learn how to care about each other. There are common themes in schools that can lay the foundations for that understanding, although each must be implemented in a culturally appropriate context. We need to teach at an early age and consistently about building just, ethical and sustainable relationships between humanity and nature. In the Asia-Pacific, this incredibly and beautifully varied region, we all need to learn to live well in the context of super diversity. As an interlinking component, we need to design education systems that inculcate a culture of peace. We are clear-eyed about the scope of the task ahead of us. Prior to the pandemic, the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific concluded that the region was already falling behind in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly in terms of the climate crisis and environmental targets. As societies weather and recover from the pandemic, we must rebuild from more sustainable and equitable foundations that brings us all together for resilient positive peace.

Poverty consists of a systematic or structural denial of basic freedoms, as articulated by Sen, resulting in agency constrained to the extent that individuals are unable or lack the ‘capability’ to meet their basic needs. The denial of one freedom amplifies or multiplies the denial of other freedoms, rendering the poor disproportionately vulnerable to a whole array of violations. Poverty not only means lack of money; it means a concomitant impairment of access to adequate healthcare, water, shelter, etc. In terms of de facto and de jure rights, the poor clearly experience a different de facto realization of human rights…those living in poverty, on balance, have less access to the kind of economic resources that are necessary for adequate healthcare, education and welfare services, which may in turn effect the degree to which they enjoy their civil and political rights.34 Poverty, therefore, constitutes a structural violation of human rights. There are systemic reasons that explain why the poor bear a disproportionate burden of rights violations. In this sense, Farmer’s assertion rings eerily true: Human rights violations are not accidents; they are not random in distribution or effect. Rights violations are, rather, symptoms of deeper pathologies of power and are linked intimately to the social conditions that so often determine who will suffer abuse and who will be shielded from harm.35 Furthermore, poverty, although it has an irreducible economic connotation does not necessarily imply the primacy of economic factors in the causation of poverty. For example, when discrimination based on gender, ethnicity or any other ground denies a person access to health-care resources, the resulting ill-health is clearly a case of capability failure that should count as poverty because the lack of access to resources has played a role.36 The social factors, such as sexism and racism, also represent additional instances of structural violence that constrain agency. From a structuralist perspective, with a focus on interdependent relationships, there are clear inequalities between collectivities along social axes. Recalling the example cited earlier in the essay regarding African-American women who are disproportionately at risk of contracting and dying from AIDS and suffering from rape and starvation among numerous other human rights violations in natural catastrophes, race is clearly a social axis along which inequalities have been institutionalized. Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois contend that since social structures have institutionalized structural violence, social structures therein render that violence invisible. For them, structural violence is ‘everyday violence [or] part of the normative fabric of social and political life. Structural violence is generally invisible because it is part of the routine grounds of everyday life…’ 37 Most studied in the social axes of structural violence are race, class and gender inequalities. The social location of the individual is crucial to determining how the individual’s agency is constrained, and how that makes an individual vulnerable to human rights violations.

There are two main mechanisms by which poverty might be claimed to operate as a significant cause of conflict. First, poverty may generate bitterness and rage which, in turn, may cause poor people to protest. Protest may provoke repression and tensions may escalate into open armed conflict, completing the causal mechanisms of a ‘frustrationaggression nexus’ (Gurr, 1970). Second, poverty may cause conflict because violence is simply cost free, especially where there are incentives to engage in conflict. In other words, because the poor have ‘a comparative advantage in violence’ or because the ‘opportunity cost of violence’ is low for the poor, they are likely to make conflict more likely. Both possible mechanisms require further detail, of course, but this stylised version suggests that, in either, extreme poverty may increase the likelihood of conflict. On the one hand, if poverty provokes violent resentment then surely extreme poverty will intensify frustration and tip the balance even more easily towards conflict. On the other hand, if conflict is a function of the poor having a comparative advantage in violence, then surely the very poor, with even fewer opportunities and with even more dire lives than the less poor, will have an even lower opportunity cost of violence: again, this should make conflict more likely still. The two possibilities run together in the argument that ‘borderlands and other spatial pockets typified by weak state presence may indeed provide fertile ground for mobilisation of militant groups’ (CPRC, 2004).12 Yet this logic runs into two important questions. Who are the very poorest? And can one generalise to identify which sub-groups of the poor are more significant causal factors of and participants in conflict? Urban and peri-urban poor people have been important to the origin and prevalence of conflict and social violence in many parts of the world of late – e.g. in Monrovia (Liberia) and Freetown (Sierra Leone), in the pogroms of Surat (India), in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and in Mogadishu (Somalia) and elsewhere. However, probably the majority of people drawn into conflict are still rural poor people.13 The difficulty is, though, that it is just as commonly observed that the poor and disadvantaged do not automatically or usually rise up. If poverty and inequality were powerful causes of conflict, surely conflict would be more frequent? One would expect, in that case, a major conflict involving north eastern Brazil rather than the festering dispersed little conflicts and ‘everyday violence’ faced by the poor.14 China would be in dramatic violent ferment.15 Rather more of sub-Saharan Africa would be at war than actually is. Many parts of the world resemble the conditions identified before the civil war in El Salvador, where sociologists characterised the rural poor as ’fatally resigned to poverty and misery, as venerating both civil and military authority, and with little potential for class consciousness’ (Wood, 2003: 14), and identified ‘attitudes of self-deprecation, fatalism, conformism, and individualism among Salvadoran campesinos’ (ibid: 24). Further, extreme poverty may be characterised by alcoholism, mental health problems, disability, fragmented families, etc., all of which may dampen political involvement.

SOME CONCEPTUAL ISSUES The word 'security' comes from the Latin root meaning 'lack of care' (Dower 1995). It applies to different referent objects such as the nation (national security), human beings (human security), and investments (financial security). It also applies to different risks such as stock market crashes and earthquakes, and different threats, such as rape or military invasion. Soroos (1997, p. 236) defines security as 'the assurance people have that they will continue to enjoy those things that are most important to their survival and well-being'. Depending on who is to be secured, and how environmental change--and what sorts of change--threatens them, environmental change can be considered as a security issue. Environmental change is taken here to mean short and long term changes in biological, physical and chemical components and systems resulting from both human activities and natural processes. There is now widespread agreement that important things that individuals, groups and countries value are vulnerable to environmental changes, giving rise to the concept of 'environmental security'. However, there is no agreed definition of environmental security (Dalby 2002), and there is even less consideration of what environmental insecurity means (Barnett 2001). In this article environmental insecurity is defined as the vulnerability of individuals and groups to critical adverse effects caused directly or indirectly by environmental change. It is a state that is realised when individuals and groups are unable to avoid or adapt to environmental change. Environmental security is therefore the ability of individuals to avoid or adapt to environmental change so that things that are important to their well-being are not substantially negatively affected. Of course this definition, like Soroos' above, raises the problem of determining what any given individuals' and groups' preferences are with respect to their needs and values. However, there is a widely agreed set of needs and rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration on and the associated Covenants on Civil and Political Rights and Economic Social and Cultural Rights, and these should be taken as a minimum list of the things that should be secured from environmental change. So, examples of environmental insecurity include desertification and poverty causing hunger and migration from pastoral areas in the Sahel (Franke & Chasin 1980), water scarcity and pollution causing illness and economic decline in the Aral Sea (Weinthal 2002), and violence triggered by the environmental impacts of the Panguna mine on Bougainville (Boge 1999). Peace is most commonly defined as the absence of violence. Violence can be defined narrowly as being direct harm caused to a person's body, or broadly to include both direct harm and a range of other social problems that have some degree of adverse consequences. The most well known of these broader definitions of violence comes from Galtung (1969, p. 168), who defines violence as 'the difference between the potential and the actual, between what could have been and what is'. This is obviously appropriate for acts that cause harm to people's bodies or minds, yet it encounters problems when it applies to what Galtung calls 'structural violence', which he says is caused by systems of unequal power that structure unequal life chances such that a person's potential is in some way unrealised. This includes acts and processes such as racial or sexual discrimination, declining terms of trade, malnutrition, and unemployment, which all constrain the realisation of people's potential. In short, structural violence is about social injustice and inequality--the absence of which Galtung calls 'positive peace'. The problem is that perfect is the implied goal of attempts to eliminate structural violence, and this is neither practically possible nor necessarily desirable (Boulding 1977). So, while this paper accepts Galtung's definition of peace as being the absence of direct and structural violence, it adopts Barnett's (2008) understanding of structural violence, which is based on Sen's (1999) work on the freedoms and opportunities necessary for development. In this view, structural violence arises from the inequitable distribution of economic opportunities, political freedoms, social opportunities, transparency guarantees, and protective security. The equitable distribution of these freedoms and opportunities would greatly assist people to satisfy their physiological and psychosocial needs, and allowing them to act as they see fit according to the values that are important to them. Based on this understanding of peace as the absence of direct and structural violence, the paper now proceeds to explain four of the key connections between environmental security and peace. These connections are based on the way environmental change may influence direct and structural violence, and in turn the way direct and structural violence influence environmental change. ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE AND VIOLENT CONFLICT Most of the literature on environmental security concerns the possible linkages between environmental change and violent conflict. It is therefore relevant to that part of peace that concerns the absence of direct violence. This field of research has been well reviewed elsewhere (Dalby 2002; Gleditsch 2001; Hartmann 2001), and so what follows is a summary of findings. There is general agreement that there are indirect links between environmental change and violent conflict. However, environmental change is not the only or even the most important of factors leading to violent conflict (Homer-Dixon & Blitt 1998; Baechler 1999). Other factors--such as poverty and inequities between groups, high levels of military spending and/or high availability of weapons, external indebtedness, poorly developed conflict resolution institutions, a history of violence, state illegitimacy, weak or no , an abundance of lootable resources, and poor leadership--all seem to matter as much if not more than environmental change per se (Collier 2000; Cramer 2003; David 1997; Esty et al. 1999; Gleditsch 2001; Goodhand 2003; Kahl 2006; Raknereud & Hegre 1997). Environmental factors do not, and are unlikely to, trigger war between countries, even in the case of rivers whose waters are shared by more than one country (Baechler 1999; Homer-Dixon & Percival 1996; Wolf 1999). Rather, environmental changes can increase the risk of violent conflict and social instability within countries where governance systems are in transition, levels of inequality are high, and social-ecological systems are highly sensitive to environmental change. Many studies suggest that 'strong states' with a high trade/GDP ratio tend to be simultaneously more capable of managing environmental degradation, less dependent on primary resources for income and employment, and less prone to internal conflicts (Collier 2000; de Soysa 2000; Hauge & Ellingsen 2001). In resource dependent societies governed by weak states, environmental changes can alter the distribution of natural and economic capital among people and local groups in ways that can stimulate grievances, which may ultimately lead to violence. These grievances often form along the lines of pre-existing vertical (class-based), horizontal (spatially-based), and age-based inequalities. For example, Bobrow-Strain (2001) has described how declining agricultural production caused by changes in political and market conditions did not affect all people in a district of Chiapas equally, and that this changing social landscape led to land conflicts. Timura (2001) has also argued that unequal access to economic and political resources was a factor in conflicts in Mexico, as well as the 'Guinea Fowl' war in Ghana, and conflict in Para, Brazil. It has been reasonably well demonstrated, therefore, that environmental change can increase the risk of direct violence within if not between states and, inasmuch as this is true, it follows that from direct violence requires that environmental change be avoided or people's abilities to adapt to it be enhanced, at least in resource dependent societies in weak states. However, because environmental change does not increase the risk of violent conflict in isolation from other important social factors that are typically associated with structural violence, addressing these factors is also important.

The Most Potent Stimulant In addition to being the deadliest form of violence, structural violence is also the most potent stimulant of behavioral violence. American civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. (1967) was prescient in calling the “deplorable crimes” of African-Americans to be “derivative crimes”—born of the greater crimes of the white society. Gilligan (1996) has drawn a relation-ship between structural violence—or divisions into superiority and inferiority, by whatever means—and the shame, stress, discrimination, and denigration that result from a lower sta-tus. This underlying psychology in turn stimulates murders, wars, suicides, and deaths from stress‐induced illness. Others have framed it in terms of an erosion of social networks and trust (Elgar & Aitken, 2010). The increase in rates of death and disability that arise from structural violence often results from overt violence in the form of family violence, gender violence, racial violence, hate crimes, police violence, state violence, massacres, terrorism, and war. Indeed, a World Bank‐sponsored study proved that in 39 nations around the world, homicide rates increased with inequality (Fajnzylber, Lederman, & Loayza, 2002). By using rates of employment as a measure of inequality (Galbraith, 1998), we discover that unemployment brings greater mortality (Martikainen & Valkonen, 1996). The figures are valid even among the more developed countries. For 26 European nations, from 1970 to 2007, every 1% increase in unemployment indicated a 0.79% rise in suicides and a 0.79% rise in homicides (Stuckler et al., 2009). Globalized corporate management, with a rising percent-age of layoffs, downsizing, and impersonal management styles has seen rises in workplace vio-lence, usually ending with the perpetrator’s suicide (Noer, 2009).Another cross‐sectional study of 165 countries showed that economic development, inequality, and poverty are significant predictors of homicide, although there are many variations in homicide for lower‐income countries (Ouimet, 2012). Some researchers have taken excess deaths and poor health outcomes to be indicators of unequal development (Pickett & Wilkinson, 2015), while others have approached the question from a feminist perspective (Anglin, 1998; Brock‐Utne, 1989), or in terms of human rights (Eisler, 1997). Economic decline, income inequality, and pervasive rent seeking by ruling elites can generate a reduced surplus in the larger population that can threaten entire nations. Weakening states, alongside competitions for control of goods, eventually give rise to humanitarian emergencies due to war and state violence (Nafziger & Auvinen, 2002). There is also political decay in relation to relative depriva-tion or a perception of injustice arising from a growing discrepancy between expectations and economic and social realities. The structural violence of domination, exploitation, and humili-ation also needs to draw on physical violence in order to coerce its victims to submit to the more powerful party. Some have shown that well‐established democracies do not make war (Rummel, 2003; Weart, 1998), while power and inequality among nations are associated with interstate wars (Hinsley, 1967; van Evera, 2013).Perhaps in need of special emphasis are the effects of economic inequality on suicide. Unemployment (Voss et al., 2004) and frequency of bankruptcy (Weyerer & Wiedenmann, 1995) are highly associated with increased suicide, with a twofold to threefold increase in rela-tive risk (Blakely, Collings, & Atkinson, 2003). However, what is important is not absolute but relative poverty, pointing to factors other than material deprivation. In settings of high economic inequality, suicide among the poor rises drastically, but so does suicide among the rich, to a lesser degree (Daly, Wilson, & Johnson, 2013). With rising inequalities, a concern for human rights becomes more prominent. Human rights are moral principles or norms that outline standards for the treatment of others, in recognition of the inherent dignity and equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family (United Nations, 1948). The topic has entered into international dialog over the last century in the effort to understand how violence, terrorism, war, poverty, inequality, development, and democracy relate to one another. In the context of rising inequalities (Piketty & Goldhammer, 2014), the drive for a more humane and inclusive kind of globalization and development has led to the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights, which animated the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and ultimately influenced the drafting of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (United Nations, 2015).

Structural violence is persistent also in the form of gender disparities. Although the lives of women around the world have improved noticeably in recent decades, gaps in access to rights, education, health, and jobs still remain. One of the worst disparities is the rate at which girls and women die relative to males in low‐income, developing countries, where an estimated 3.9 million excess deaths occur each year, purely as a result of gender inequality. Almost two‐fifths of all female fetuses worldwide are never allowed to grow due to a pref-erence for sons, one‐sixth of all girls die in childhood, and over one‐third of women die in their reproductive years (World Bank, 2012). An important facet of this gender‐biased structural violence is the fact that it leads to, and encourages, behavioral violence. Countries in the Middle East, Central and Southern Asia, and North Africa record higher rates of gender‐based violence than the rates in Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development (OECD) countries. The South Asia region, known for its poor economic status, contains 69% of the world’s population but suffers 96% of the world’s structural violence. In Bangladesh, men propagate violence on women mainly because they have witnessed violence in their families of origin, and because social systems and structures condone such violence (Cross, 2013). Similar studies have shown that women with little education in Egypt are far more likely to tolerate violence from their husbands, especially if they are dependent on them for sustenance.Not all gender‐based structural violence is necessarily behavioral; statistics of income dif-ferences in the US show that in 2012 the wage rate for men was 23% higher than that for women, the difference being attributable to cultural biases that deny women the same oppor-tunities as men to explore their potential. Women 1year out of college and working full time earned on average 35,296US dollars per year, while their male counterparts earned 42,918 dollars per year (Kesley, 2013). Another aspect of this gender disparity is the statistics on maternal deaths. In the 1980s, half a million maternal deaths occurred annually, of which 99% were in poor countries. Although the number of annual maternal deaths has been declining since then, a 2010 survey report by the UN Population Fund (FPA) showed that pregnancy‐ and birth‐related complications are still the leading causes of death among 15‐ to 19‐year‐olds in low‐income countries (Mukherjee et al., 2011).Structural violence can also operate through systematic racial disparities. The United States is home to systematic racial discrimination; the US incarcerates 2.4 million people, and although African‐Americans make up only 13% of the population, they comprise 41% of the country’s prison population. And while drug‐use figures are similar for blacks and whites in the US, the former are 2.8 to 5.5 times more likely to be arrested and to receive longer and harsher sentences for this kind of crime than the latter (Human Rights Watch, 2009).A recent US Department of Justice report (2015) on the police department of Ferguson, Missouri, following an investigation of the 2014 police killing of an unarmed African‐American teenager, revealed that the impact on African‐Americans is disproportionate at all levels of jus-tice, a trend that is widespread throughout the entire country (Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, 2012). This kind of disparity is directly attributable to structural racism, which facilitates nega-tive stereotypes and legitimizes keeping minority groups from defending themselves. Many of the U.S. practices, particularly in the areas of criminal justice, immigration, and national secu-rity, violate international human rights standards in this manner (Human Rights Watch, 2015).A more hidden but similar trend is apparent in unemployment figures: data from a 2013 Center for Economic and Policy Research survey showed that the overall unemployment rate among 22‐ to 27‐year‐old college graduates in the US was 5.6%, while for African‐American graduates, it was 12.4% (Jones & Schmitt, 2014). At the same time, African‐Americans exhibit elevated rates of mortality for 8 out of the 10 major causes of death, most of which have an association with disparities in healthcare access (Williams & Collins, 2001). In 2008, white Americans with 16years or more of schooling had life expectancies far greater than African‐Americans with fewer than 12years of education—14.2years for men and 10.3years for women (Olshansky et al., 2012). Europe also has a number of disturbing trends in the area of racial disparity, which are now threatening to enter mainstream politics through far‐right parties, thereby further entrenching discriminatory structures. Sentiments against immigration are run-ning particularly high, with most Europeans viewing immigrants as an economic burden, as not assimilating, and as perpetrating crimes—these attitudes are a side effect of global structural violence, which divides rich countries and poor countries roughly over racial lines.Another form of structural violence is the control of voting rights and the denial of political power. This can occur either within sovereign states, as in the Apartheid regime of South Africa, or within international bodies like the International Monetary Fund, in which countries such as Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States exert excessive influence. For example, the US treasury funds more than half of the World Bank and therefore has numerous fiscal privileges, while low-income countries like those in Africa have little hope of enjoying the same privileges and thus the benefits of trade liberalization (Global Envision, 2007). Global insti-tutions can also facilitate and encourage corruption in national governments and institutions: in the face of extreme inequalities, it is far more lucrative for the latter to cater to the interests of foreign governments and firms than to the interests of their impoverished compatriots (Pogge, 2002). In this manner, the power to choose and to change unjust structures is unavailable to those who do not have the power in the first place

Healthcare, Nutrition, and Liberty Disparities As we have already stated, structural violence can take many forms and can be so entrenched in the social order that it is difficult to recognize. In this section, we will examine a few of the more widespread and recognizable ways in which structural violence can manifest in society. One of the most pressing ways in which structural violence causes morbidity and mortality in people is through healthcare disparities. Preventable diseases such as diarrhea and pneumonia kill approximately two million children worldwide every year, simply because they are too poor to afford the effective treatment that is available (United Nations Children’s Fund [UNICEF], 2012). As of 2013, nearly 22 million children under the age of one had not received proper vac-cinations against diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis (UNICEF & WHO, 2014). In 2010, almost 300,000 childbirth‐related deaths occurred globally, most of them in low‐ and middle‐income countries, and most of them avoidable (WHO, UNICEF, United Nations Population Fund [UNFPA], & The World Bank, 2012). Over the past 50years, the maternal mortality rate of black women in the US has been four times as high as that of white women (Tucker, Berg, Callaghan, & Hsia, 2007). In 2007, the infant mortality rate for non‐Hispanic black women was 2.4 times that of non‐Hispanic white women (Mathews & MacDorman, 2011).One of the deadlier healthcare disparities pertains to the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection. Studies indicate that 88% of all children and 60% of all women infected with HIV live in sub‐Saharan Africa, where nations are typically low‐income and underdeveloped. In 2007, an estimated 40 million people were living with HIV, more than 90% of them from low‐income countries with limited access to prevention and treatment facilities. Reasons for inadequate resources can be variable: in Northern Uganda, for example, which has been terrorized by the resistance army for over 15years, an internal displacement of 1.8million people has led to the virtual collapse of public services in the refugee camps. Consequently, the HIV prevalence in this northern region is twice that of the rest of the country (Mukherjee, 2007). Even in the US, infection rates among women of color are higher than among white women. In the Syracuse area of New York, African‐American women have 12.5 times more cases of AIDS than whites (Lane et al., 2004).Increasing poverty is another symptom and indication of structural violence. The inability to afford basic nutrition for survival is a mark of extreme poverty, but according to the United Nations World Food Programme (UNWFP, 2016), malnutrition is the leading cause of death globally, killing more people each year than HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined. More than three billion people—nearly half of the world’s population—live in poverty (on less than 2.5 US dollars per day), while more than 1.3billion live in extreme poverty (on less than 1.25US dollars per day) (United Nations Development Programme [UNDP], 2014). Nearly half of all deaths in children under the age of 5 are attributable to undernutrition, amounting to almost three million unnecessary deaths every year (UNICEF, WHO, & World Bank Group, 2015). Approximately 800 million people—almost 11% of the world’s population, 98% of whom live in low‐income countries—lack adequate food (Food and Agriculture Organization [FAO] of the UN, International Fund for Agricultural Development [IFAD], & UNWFP, 2014).More than 750 million people lack access to clean, drinkable water, and low sanitation alone kills an estimated 842,000 people every year (WHO & UNICEF, 2014). Haiti, for example, is one of the poorest countries in the Western hemisphere. In that country, more than 54% of the population lives on less than one US dollar per day, and cholera outbreaks are endemic, as only 63% of the citizens have access to safe water sources (Alsan et al., 2011). According to Oxfam International (2013), it would take an estimated 60 billion US dollars annually to eradicate extreme global poverty. This figure seems unattainable and unrealistic until one considers that the world’s 10 richest billionaires own some 505 billion US dollars in combined private wealth (Peterson‐Withorn, 2015) and that the top 1% of earners holds more wealth than the rest of the planet combined (Credit Suisse, 2016) (see Figure 7.1). Charity and aid to the unfortunate, in this con-text, does little to solve the deformed statecraft that magnifies and accelerates such cruelty. The related but more extreme form of structural violence is contemporary slavery, which exists in the form of underpayment and the withholding of wages and salaries, especially to workers from low-income countries. An estimated 35.8 million people are victims of contem-porary slavery (Walk Free Foundation, 2014), and 10 nations account for 76 percent of this number, including India, China, Pakistan, and Nigeria. Although accurate figures are diffi-cult to calculate, this multibillion-dollar industry reaps up to 150 billion US dollars annually in illegal profits (International Labour Organization, 2008). Approximately 70 percent of mod-ern-day slaves are female, and up to 50 percent are minors (United States Department of State, 2005). Women and girls are forced to work primarily in the domestic sector or as commercial sex workers, while men and boys work primarily in agriculture, construction, and mining. The root causes of contemporary slavery are disparities in economic power that force citizens from low-income economies to submit to forms of slavery and human trafficking in exchange for better standards of living. The problem is not restricted to underdeveloped countries: there are case reports in the U.S. of illegal Mexican immigrants being lured into the country with promises by wealthy American families who then deny them wages (Barner, Okech, and Camp, 2014). Similarly, many citizens from developing West African nations have become victims of human traffick-ing in other high-income economies. These unfortunate laborers are typically enticed to foreign destinations with promises of a better income, only to experience exploitation as commercial sex workers or as free laborers. Given the lack of privileges of these victims, they cannot access justice for the damages they have endured. More generally, with global indus-trialization, the exploitation of child and female labor, urban crowding, slums, poverty, dis-ease, prostitution, and family breakdown have grown. World conflict now occurs largely in the form of differences in interests between elites who run economic and political systems and the majority of people who do not benefit from their policies and actions. Consequently, slavery is in rapid resurgence in the context of extreme inequality.

A Lead Into Self‐Directed Violence Structural violence can also lead to higher suicides. When the first of three Free Trade Zones (FTZ) in Sri Lanka was established in the town of Katunayake in 1978 under the World Bank/International Monetary Fund (IMF) structural adjustment program, it was expected that rural, unemployed women who have little chance to find wage employment elsewhere would fill the newly created assembly‐line jobs. They would work for only a few years before marriage to accumulate money and jewelry for their dowry. The assumption was that the women work-ing in the zones would accept employment under any conditions, leading to rigorous work schedules and minimal wages. By 1995, Sri Lanka records the highest rate of suicide in the world at 48 deaths per 100,000, and the rate is two and a half times greater in rural areas than in metropolitan centers, corresponding to the rural–urban disparity in agricultural develop-ment and economic stagnation. More than half of all suicides in Sri Lanka are committed by young people, age 15 to 29, of both sexes.A wailing woman, Ramya, threatens to kill herself but is restrained and pushed onto a bed. When Ramya’s wailing and physical struggles do not stop, another woman pins her to the wall and tells her sternly to stop behaving like an ignorant fool and act like the educated woman she is. Ramya seems to consider this and quiets down for a while. A few hours later, she starts wailing again. Another resident, Malika, talks to her in a soft voice, asking her to “be a good child, and listen to what others say.” Ramya again quiets down and falls asleep with her head on a friend’s lap. Women casually mention committing suicide at the factories. It is common for them to point to a stressful situation and to say that the only thing left for them to do is to put a rope around their necks and hang themselves or to pour a bottle of poison in their mouths. These suicidal expressions usually come at the end of a long story and appear to provide relief and a symbolic closure to their concerns. Listeners offer comforting words, praising the storyteller for having the courage not to commit suicide despite the problems. Often the story-teller adds a few more sentences about how hard resisting the impulse for self‐harm is, and how they are strong women who can negotiate an unfair world with quiet resolve. They overcome their difficulties through a common identity as migrant transnational factory workers and the sisterhood the women develop with their housemates.In a short story by one of the FTZ workers, a worker who has committed suicide narrates the following story from her coffin, surveying her own funeral: “Both amma [mother] and thatha[father] are crying now. You would not have to cry so much if you had been more understand-ing of my problems. Look at the way boarding [house] auntie is grieving. I hope at least now she will be more sympathetic toward girls’ problems. Ah, here comes Kumar. He is crying now. He should. He is the reason why I am lying here.” In the story, the dead woman takes her revenge by making all those who have wronged her regret their actions. The story grows haunting at the end as she screams in fear, pleading with her relatives and friends not to leave her alone in the cold, dark cemetery (Hewamanne, 2010).

A Lead Into Collective Violence Structural violence, or systematic subjugation, can lead to a greater chance of overt violence. A civil rights campaign arose in Northern Ireland, UK, in the mid‐1960s with grievances calling for an end to job, housing, and voting discrimination, as well as an end to gerrymandering that reduced voting power, a reduction in police brutality and the allowance for police to search without a warrant, arrest, and imprison people without charge or trial—which favored Loyalists (supporters of continued English involvement) over Republicans (opponents of English involvement who desire unification of Northern Ireland with the Irish Republic). The move-ment was largely nonviolent at the start, but the emergence of armed paramilitary organiza-tions led to warfare over the next three decades. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) is any of several armed movements in Ireland dedicated to Irish Republicanism, or the belief that all of Ireland should be an independent republic. It is also characterized by the belief that political violence is necessary to achieve that goal. The conflict in Northern Ireland between Loyalists and Republicans has claimed many lives throughout the years of violence. The conflict in Northern Ireland between Loyalists and Republicans is also a division between Protestants and Catholics, and the violence in many cases is as much about brutal sectarianism as about political goals. The Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) develops in 1969, splitting from the rest of the Republican movement due to differences in political and military strategy. Violent conflict over British involvement in Ireland has an extensive history even as the political landscape shifts. The British withdrew from the majority of the Irish island in 1921, the part that became the independent Republic of Ireland in 1948, and the island was geographically partitioned to form Northern Ireland, a part of the waning British Empire. The PIRA operates as an insurgent terrorist organization, carrying out operations in Northern Ireland, in the Irish Republic, on the British mainland, and in other areas, including continental Europe and the United States. Their goal is to force a British withdrawal from Ireland and to establish a Democratic Socialist Republic based on the Easter Proclamation of 1916. As it pursues these goals, the group seeks to maintain the allegiance of the Catholic population in Northern Ireland and the Republic, its primary support community. The PIRA also draws on Republican traditions that call for brutal force as the means by which to achieve the goal of Irish unification. Included in the IRA’s violence is directed political assassinations. Lord Mountbatten is a leg-endary British statesman and a naval officer, as well as an uncle of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, and cousin to Elizabeth II. Despite security advice and warnings, in August 1979, Mountbatten goes fishing in his wooden boat, which IRA member Thomas McMahon had slipped into the previous night and attached a radio‐controlled bomb. When Mountbatten is a few hundred yards from the shore, the bomb detonates. The IRA claims responsibility for the death of Lord Mountbatten. They say that the operation is one of the ways they can bring the continuing occupation of their country to the attention of the English people. The many trib-utes to Mountbatten, they note, will sharply contrast with the indifference of the British gov-ernment and the English people to the deaths of Irish men, women, and children, as well as Irish soldiers at the hands of the British forces. Gerry Adams, one of the leaders of the IRA, says that what the IRA did to Lord Mountbatten is what Mountbatten has been doing all his life to other people. With his war record, Adams argues, Lord Mountbatten could not object to dying in what is clearly a war situation (Jackson, Baker, & Cragin, 2005).