Unpacking the Dimensions of Violence: Cultural, Economic, Political, and Social

When most people picture violence, they think of physical harm: a fist, a weapon, a riot. But this is only the visible tip of a much larger iceberg. A child who dies because her village has no clean water, a worker trapped in bonded labour, a Dalit family barred from a temple, a woman silenced by social norms that call her inferior. These are all forms of violence too, even when no one throws a single punch. Understanding violence in all its dimensions is the first step toward building genuine peace and human security. This is where the work of Norwegian peace researcher Johan Galtung, widely regarded as the founder of peace studies, becomes essential.

What do we mean by violence? 🔗

Galtung redefined violence in a way that transformed how scholars study conflict. Rather than limiting violence to physical acts, he defined it as anything that prevents people from realising their full potential, the gap between what is and what could have been. If a person dies of a curable disease simply because they could not access medicine, that is violence, even though no attacker exists. This broader definition forces us to look beyond individual perpetrators and examine the systems, beliefs, and structures that cause harm.

To organise this thinking, Galtung developed what is known as the violence triangle. It identifies three interconnected forms of violence: direct, structural, and cultural. He divided these into the visible and the invisible. Direct violence is visible and easy to recognise. Structural and cultural violence are invisible, embedded so deeply in everyday life that we often fail to notice them at all. Crucially, Galtung argued that these forms feed one another in vicious cycles, with cultural and structural violence often producing the direct violence we eventually see on the surface.

While Galtung’s original model focused on three dimensions, the framework is commonly expanded to examine violence across cultural, economic, political, and social spheres. These categories overlap, but each reveals something distinct about how harm operates in society. Let us unpack them one by one.

Cultural violence: making harm seem normal 🔗

Cultural violence is perhaps the most subtle and dangerous dimension because it works invisibly. Galtung defined cultural violence as any aspect of a culture, such as religion, ideology, language, art, or science, that can be used to legitimise direct or structural violence. It does not kill or maim directly. Instead, it makes other forms of violence look or feel “right,” “natural,” or simply acceptable.

Consider how certain belief systems have historically justified terrible cruelty. The notion that some races were inferior gave moral cover to slavery and colonial exploitation. Galtung pointed out that prejudices like racism, sexism, and ideologies of a “superior race” all function as cultural violence because they make domination seem legitimate. Once a society accepts these ideas, the resulting oppression appears justified rather than criminal.

The longest-lasting layer 🔗

Cultural violence is often the most persistent of all the dimensions. Beliefs become so embedded in a culture that they are passed down across generations and reproduced without question. In India, narratives that frame poverty or low social status as the result of karma or destiny can serve this function, discouraging people from challenging the inequalities they face. When inequality is presented as natural or even deserved, those who suffer from it are less likely to resist, and those who benefit feel no guilt. This is what makes cultural violence so powerful: it shapes the very lens through which people interpret their world.

Economic violence: the harm of unjust structures 🔗

Economic violence flows from economic systems that systematically deprive people of the resources they need for a dignified life. It is closely tied to what Galtung called structural violence, where harm has no single, identifiable perpetrator but instead arises from the way society is organised. Nobody “decides” to make millions poor, yet the structure produces poverty all the same.

Poverty itself is a form of violence. When economic systems consistently favour the wealthy, the rich gain better access to education, healthcare, and opportunity, while the poor remain trapped in cycles of low-wage work and limited prospects. The scale of this problem is striking. According to analysis highlighted by the World Economic Forum, around a quarter of India’s population lives below an extremely low poverty line, and income inequality has risen sharply since the early 1990s. Low public spending on health and education compounds the problem, leaving the poorest with the fewest tools to escape.

Exploitation and the cycle of poverty 🔗

Economic violence is not only about being poor; it is about exploitation. Workers may labour long hours for wages that cannot sustain a decent life, while the profits flow to those at the top. Bonded labour, unsafe working conditions, and the denial of fair wages all represent ways in which economic structures extract value from the vulnerable while keeping them powerless. This is why economists and human rights scholars treat poverty not as a misfortune but as a structural failure, an avoidable condition that society chooses to tolerate.

The connection between economic violence and trafficking illustrates this point sharply. Human trafficking in India is often framed as a crime, but at its root it is a structural failure driven by poverty, illiteracy, and social exclusion. Traffickers exploit the economic desperation that unjust structures create. Addressing the crime alone, without tackling the underlying inequality, leaves the conditions for exploitation firmly in place.

Political violence: power, coercion, and the state 🔗

Political violence involves the use or threat of force to achieve political objectives. It comes in two broad forms. The first is violence by non-state actors, including insurgency and terrorism, where groups use fear and bloodshed to advance a political cause. The second, and often overlooked, form is state violence, where governments themselves use coercion against their own citizens.

State violence can take many shapes: extrajudicial killings, custodial torture, suppression of dissent, and the misuse of security laws. Human rights organisations have documented troubling patterns in this area. Amnesty International has reported on the use of criminal laws to silence journalists and activists, while counterinsurgency operations in regions affected by Maoist conflict have raised allegations of abuses against ordinary villagers. When the very institutions meant to protect citizens become instruments of harm, the result is a particularly corrosive form of political violence.

When the state fails to act 🔗

Political violence is not only about what the state does; it is also about what it fails to do. When laws exist to protect vulnerable groups but are not enforced, the resulting harm is a political failure. Reports by Human Rights Watch have noted that marginalised communities, including religious minorities, Dalits, and tribal groups, continue to face discrimination and violence, often with weak protection from authorities. The selective enforcement of law, or its complete absence, allows powerful groups to act with impunity. In this sense, political violence and structural violence are deeply intertwined.

Social violence: inequality woven into society 🔗

Social violence arises from structural inequalities such as casteism, racism, sexism, and other systems of discrimination that deny entire groups their rights and dignity. It targets people not for what they do but for who they are. In the Indian context, the caste system offers one of the clearest examples of how social violence operates across generations.

The scale of caste-based harm is well documented. According to research cited by human rights observers, degrading treatment justified on the basis of caste has affected well over 165 million people in India. Caste divisions shape housing, marriage, employment, and daily social interaction, and they are reinforced through social ostracism, economic boycotts, and the threat of physical violence. This is structural violence in its purest form, harm that endures with no clear beginning and no single actor responsible.

Intersecting vulnerabilities 🔗

Social violence rarely affects everyone in a group equally. It often combines multiple forms of disadvantage, hitting those at the intersection of several marginalised identities the hardest. Dalit women, for instance, face discrimination based on both caste and gender simultaneously. Human rights documentation has shown how sexual violence has at times been used as a tool of social control and intimidation against marginalised communities, and how victims frequently struggle to obtain justice because of biases within institutions. The documented links between caste discrimination and police inaction reveal how social violence is propped up by both political and economic structures.

How the dimensions connect 🔗

The most important insight from this framework is that these dimensions never operate in isolation. They form an interconnected web in which each one reinforces the others. Cultural violence provides the ideological justification. Economic violence creates material desperation. Political violence maintains existing hierarchies through coercion or neglect. Social violence sustains everyday exclusion. Together they create self-reinforcing cycles that are extraordinarily difficult to break.

The practice of manual scavenging illustrates this interconnection well. Cultural violence, through caste ideology, frames the work as the “natural” duty of certain communities. Economic violence keeps those communities trapped in poverty with few alternatives. Political violence appears when laws banning the practice go unenforced, or when those who protest face repression. Social violence maintains the marginalisation through ongoing discrimination. No single dimension explains the whole picture; only by seeing them together can we understand why such practices persist.

Why this framework matters for human security 🔗

Recognising these dimensions changes how we think about peace. Galtung distinguished between “negative peace,” the mere absence of direct violence, and “positive peace,” the absence of structural and cultural violence as well. A society can be free of war and yet remain deeply violent if it tolerates poverty, discrimination, and oppression. True human security therefore requires more than ending physical conflict. It demands dismantling the invisible structures and beliefs that harm people every day.

This is also why solutions cannot be one-dimensional. Tackling poverty without challenging cultural narratives that justify inequality will achieve little. Enforcing laws without addressing economic desperation will not stop exploitation. Lasting peace requires working across all four dimensions at once, transforming the cultural stories we tell, the economic systems we build, the political institutions we trust, and the social hierarchies we accept.

What do you think? If a society has no war but tolerates widespread poverty and discrimination, can it truly be called peaceful? And which dimension of violence, cultural, economic, political, or social, do you believe is the hardest to change, and why?

References

1. https://www.galtung-institut.de/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Cultural-Violence-Galtung.pdf
2. https://rpl.hds.harvard.edu/what-we-do/our-approach/peace-violence
3. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0022343390027003005
4. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2016/10/inequality-in-india-oxfam-explainer/
5. https://www.sprihasociety.org/post/human-trafficking-in-india-a-gendered-human-rights-failure-rooted-in-structural-inequality
6. https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/asia-and-the-pacific/south-asia/india/report-india/
7. https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2025/country-chapters/india
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste-related_violence_in_India
9. https://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/india/India994-04.htm