Direct and Structural Violence in Peace Studies

When we hear the word “violence,” our minds usually jump to images of war, riots, or physical assault. But that picture is incomplete. A child who dies because she never had access to clean water or basic healthcare is also a victim of violence, even though no one struck her. Understanding peace, therefore, requires us to look beyond fists and bullets and examine the deeper, often invisible, forms of harm that shape human lives. This is exactly what Norwegian scholar Johan Galtung, widely regarded as the founder of peace studies, set out to do when he expanded our entire vocabulary for thinking about violence and peace.

Why violence is central to peace studies 🔗

Peace and conflict studies begins with a deceptively simple question: what exactly is peace? For a long time, scholars treated peace as merely the absence of war. Galtung found this definition far too narrow. In the founding editorial of the Journal of Peace Research in 1964, he distinguished between two kinds of peace. Negative peace is the absence of direct violence and war, while positive peace involves the integration of human society and the removal of deeper injustices. This distinction reshaped the field, because it meant a society could be free of war and still be deeply unpeaceful.

To understand peace fully, then, we must first map out the forms violence can take. Galtung’s most influential contribution is a three-part typology of violence that distinguishes between direct, structural, and cultural violence. These three forms are not isolated; they feed into and reinforce one another. Examining each in turn reveals why true peace is far harder to achieve than simply ending a war.

Direct violence: the visible harm 🔗

Direct violence is the form most people instantly recognise. It refers to harm that hits human beings as a direct result of the actions of others. There is a clear actor who commits the act, a clear victim who suffers it, and usually a clear event we can point to.

What direct violence looks like 🔗

This category covers behaviours that threaten life or diminish a person’s ability to meet basic needs. Examples include killing, maiming, bullying, sexual assault, and emotional manipulation. In its classic form it involves physical force such as torture, beatings, or war. But verbal violence, like humiliation and put-downs, is increasingly recognised as a form of direct harm too.

The defining feature of direct violence is that it is visible. When a riot breaks out, when a soldier fires a weapon, or when one person assaults another, the harm manifests as an observable event. This visibility makes direct violence relatively easy to identify, condemn, and respond to through laws, policing, and peacekeeping. Removing direct violence is what Galtung calls achieving negative peace.

Structural violence: the invisible injustice 🔗

Here is where Galtung’s thinking becomes genuinely revolutionary. In 1969 he introduced the concept of structural violence to capture harm that has no single, identifiable perpetrator. As the University of Chicago Divinity School explains, in structural violence there may be no person who directly harms another; instead, the violence is built into the structure of society itself and shows up as unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances.

Structural violence refers to the systematic ways in which some groups are hindered from equal access to opportunities, goods, and services needed to fulfil their basic human needs. It can be formal, embedded in legal structures such as the apartheid system that once governed South Africa, or it can operate without any legal mandate, such as the routine denial of education or healthcare to marginalised communities.

How structural violence shortens lives 🔗

The most striking aspect of structural violence is that it erodes human values and shortens life spans without anyone appearing to “do” anything. Consider a society where a particular community has dramatically less access to nutritious food, clean water, and medical care. Their life expectancies fall as a result. No individual is firing a gun, yet people are dying preventable deaths. The structure itself is the weapon.

This is why structural violence is described as silent and invisible. It does not produce dramatic headlines or single moments of crisis. Instead, it operates quietly through poverty, malnutrition, lack of schooling, and exclusion, perpetuating social injustice across generations. Because it has no obvious actor, it is far harder to name and confront than direct violence.

Structural violence in the Indian context 🔗

India offers some of the clearest real-world illustrations of structural violence, particularly through the caste system. Beyond direct physical attacks, the caste hierarchy perpetuates harm caused not by individual acts but by the very rules and norms that govern society. Dalits and other oppressed castes face systemic exclusion from education, land ownership, and economic opportunities, creating enduring cycles of poverty and disenfranchisement.

The practice of untouchability is perhaps the clearest example. Despite being constitutionally prohibited, it continues in many forms, with some communities still forced into degrading occupations like manual scavenging and facing segregation in housing and restrictions on access to water and healthcare. According to a report supported by Christian Aid and the European Union, much of the violence and atrocity is directly related to Dalits asserting basic rights such as land, food, decent work, and equal participation in public life. The structural disadvantage and the direct violence that enforces it are tightly linked.

Gender adds another layer. Women from marginalised communities face compounded forms of structural violence, encountering additional barriers to education, healthcare, and reproductive rights on top of caste or class disadvantage. These overlapping inequalities show how structural violence rarely operates along a single axis.

Cultural violence: the legitimiser 🔗

The third form Galtung identified, in a landmark 1990 article, is cultural violence. This refers to those aspects of a culture that can be used to make direct and structural violence look natural, right, or at least acceptable. Cultural violence is not violence in itself; rather, it is the set of ideas and beliefs that justify the other two forms.

How religion and ideology can legitimise harm 🔗

Cultural elements such as religion, ideology, language, art, and science can all be drawn upon to legitimise discriminatory practices. When a belief system teaches that some people are born inferior, it makes their exclusion seem like the natural order rather than an injustice. The caste system again provides a textbook case. Caste-based segregation is normalised by cultural and religious practices that justify it, turning systematic discrimination into something that appears divinely sanctioned and therefore beyond question.

This is the insidious power of cultural violence. It works on our attitudes and perceptions, shaping what we are willing to tolerate. A practice that ought to provoke outrage instead passes unnoticed because the surrounding culture has taught people to see it as normal. As scholars note, caste discrimination represents a deep naturalisation of difference as inferiority, where the language, occupations, and customs of marginalised groups are treated as proof of their lower status.

How the three forms connect: the violence triangle 🔗

Galtung visualised these three forms as a triangle. Direct violence sits at the visible top, while structural and cultural violence form the invisible base that sustains it. The relationship runs in a clear direction: structural violence leads to direct violence and is justified by cultural violence. All three interact in a dynamic process, each reinforcing the others.

Think of how this plays out. Cultural beliefs teach that a group is inferior (cultural violence). Those beliefs become embedded in institutions that deny the group education, jobs, and resources (structural violence). When members of that group resist or demand their rights, they face physical attacks meant to keep them “in their place” (direct violence). The cycle then feeds back on itself, as each act of direct violence reinforces the structures and cultural attitudes that produced it.

From a vicious cycle to a virtuous one 🔗

The good news is that this triangle works in reverse too. Galtung argued that the vicious spiral of violence can be broken by a virtuous spiral of peace that flows from cultural peace through structural peace to direct peace. Addressing only the visible violence is never enough. Ending direct violence through laws and peacekeeping achieves negative peace, but lasting peace requires dismantling unjust structures and transforming the cultural attitudes that legitimise them.

This is the essence of positive peace. It is not merely the silencing of guns but the active building of a just and integrated society where the deeper roots of harm have been removed. Peacebuilding tackles structural violence by reforming institutions, while peacemaking changes the attitudes underlying cultural violence. Only when all three layers are addressed can a society claim to be genuinely at peace.

Why this framework matters 🔗

Galtung’s typology fundamentally changed how we think about peace and justice. By showing that poverty, discrimination, and exclusion are forms of violence, he forced policymakers and scholars to take social systems seriously rather than focusing narrowly on warfare. The framework explains why a country can be officially “at peace” while millions of its citizens suffer shortened, constrained lives. It also gives activists and reformers a vocabulary to argue that fighting inequality is itself a form of peace work.

For anyone studying conflict, the lesson is clear. Violence is rarely just an event. More often it is a structure and a mindset, quietly operating beneath the surface long before and after any visible clash. Recognising all three forms is the first step toward building the kind of positive peace that actually endures.

What do you think? Can a society that has eliminated war and physical violence truly be called peaceful if deep structural inequalities remain? And which form of violence, the visible or the invisible, do you think is harder to dismantle?

References

1. https://www.transcend.org/tms/2025/03/direct-structural-and-cultural-violence/
2. https://www.transcend.org/tms/2024/06/on-johan-galtungs-approach-to-peace-studies/
3. https://academic.oup.com/jogss/article/doi/10.1093/jogss/ogag008/8661427
4. https://rpl.hds.harvard.edu/what-we-do/our-approach/peace-violence
5. https://divinity.uchicago.edu/sightings/articles/structural-violence-headlines
6. https://nano-ntp.com/index.php/nano/article/download/4519/3481/8678
7. https://idsn.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/IDSN-briefing-note-India-2016.pdf
8. https://www.theindiaforum.in/article/structural-violence-casteism
9. https://inkovema.de/en/blog/violence-triangle/
10. https://www.transcend.org/tms/2024/07/johan-galtung-positive-and-negative-peace/