THINKING BEYOND DIRECT VIOLENCE

The thought-provoking roundtable on "theorizing violence" in the November 2013 issue of IJMES paid much attention to different manifestations of physical violence. This is the type of violence that as early as 1969 Johan Galtung, one of the founders of the field of peace studies, termed direct violence, distinguishing it from other forms of violence, to which I will refer below. Direct violence, Galtung noted, is related to "somatic incapacitation, or deprivation of health, alone (with killing as the extreme form), at the hands of an actor who intends this to be the consequence." According to Galtung, direct violence is physically manifested, it is related to a discernible event, and it has to involve a perpetrator and a purpose.