Structural violence is driven by poverty and is has a magnitude 130 times larger than direct violence

The term “structural violence” was introduced in a 1969 essay by Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung, the main founder of peace and conflict studies and of the Journal of Peace Research. He defined peace as the absence of not only direct physical violence—ranging from interpersonal to collective violence—but also indirect structural violence, caused by forces such as poverty, marginalization, and exploitation. According to Weigert (1999:432), the notion of peace as more than the absence of war originates with Quincy Wright (1942:1305), who in A Study of War wrote that “the positive aspect of peace—justice—cannot be separated from the negative aspect—elimination of violence.” Galtung (1969:183) further conceptualized “positive peace” as the “absence of structural violence” and explicitly linked structural violence to unequal power, especially “the power to decide over the distribution of resources,” which results in “unequal life chances” (1969:171). He claimed that structural violence led to more death and suffering than physical violence, an observation later confirmed by Köhler and Alcock (1976), who estimated that the fatal consequences of structural violence globally for 1965 were about 130 times greater than for direct violence (Gilligan 1999). Galtung illustrated the idea of structural violence as avoidable harm by noting that deaths from tuberculosis in the eighteenth century were unavoidable, “but if [a person] dies from it today, despite all the medical resources in the world, then violence is present,” and he similarly argued that “differential social impact” from earthquakes is preventable(Galtung 1969:168, 186). Since then, others have linked the structural violence of poverty and environmental destruction to the increased risks and consequences of “so-called natural disasters, where conscious policies have made populations vulnerable and unprepared for predictable harms triggered by dramatic weather events” (Demenchonok and Peterson 2009:53; Kagawa 2005).