Violence is often described as the opposite of peace: an abnormal eruption that breaks an otherwise orderly social world. This understanding is comforting because it allows us to imagine that violence comes from somewhere outside ordinary political life—from evil people, irrational hatred, cultural backwardness, or the sudden collapse of reason.

But violence is rarely so external to the systems in which we live.

It emerges through relationships, institutions, histories, material pressures, political decisions, and unequal distributions of power. It may be carried out by individuals, but it is often prepared by structures long before the first physical attack occurs.

This does not mean that violence is inevitable. Nor does it mean that every society is secretly at war. It means that the possibility of violence is produced and constrained by the way collective life is organized.

The important question is therefore not simply "Why are some people violent?" but we must also ask "What conditions make violence available, legitimate, profitable, necessary, or difficult to resist?"


Violence is not one thing

Violence takes different forms.

There is direct violence: killing, assault, torture, forced displacement, sexual violence, destruction of homes, and physical intimidation.

There is structural violence: social arrangements that systematically expose some people to hunger, preventable illness, dispossession, humiliation, insecurity, or premature death.

There is institutional violence: laws, bureaucratic procedures, military doctrines, policing systems, labour arrangements, and administrative classifications that repeatedly produce unequal harm.

There is also symbolic and epistemic violence: the power to define certain people as backward, dangerous, illegal, disloyal, uncivilized, or unworthy of being heard.

These forms should not be treated as identical. A harmful word and an airstrike are not the same. Poverty and imprisonment operate through different mechanisms. A humiliating stereotype and forced displacement have different levels of immediacy and severity.

But they can reinforce one another.

Language can prepare populations to accept physical violence. Institutions can make dispossession appear legal. Economic arrangements can make some lives more vulnerable to coercion. Repeated humiliation can narrow the political space in which people believe peaceful change remains possible.

Violence is therefore best understood not as one isolated act, but as a field of interacting forces.


Violence does not require evil people

Rejecting the idea that people are born evil does not remove responsibility for cruelty.

Violence may emerge through fear, trauma, ideology, obedience, ambition, material interest, institutional incentives, strategic calculation, or perceived necessity. It can be impulsive, but it can also be carefully planned. It can be carried out by people who enjoy suffering, but it can also be carried out by ordinary people who believe they are protecting their family, religion, nation, revolution, institution, or future.

This is what makes violence politically difficult.

People rarely describe their own violence as meaningless violence. They call it:

  • defence;
  • security;
  • discipline;
  • justice;
  • liberation;
  • deterrence;
  • protection;
  • sacrifice;
  • historical necessity.

Violence does not usually arrive without a story. It arrives inside a moral vocabulary that makes it appear reasonable to those who use it.

A serious analysis must therefore examine both the material conditions of violence and the meanings that legitimize it.

But understanding these conditions is not the same as excusing them.

Explanation is necessary for prevention. It should not become a language of innocence.


Violence under structural conditions

Human beings act, but they never act from nowhere.

Their choices are shaped by:

  • access to resources;
  • institutional rules;
  • military organization;
  • economic insecurity;
  • inherited narratives;
  • collective memories;
  • trauma;
  • social expectations;
  • available political alternatives;
  • the perceived cost of refusal.

Under severe threat, agency does not disappear, but it narrows.

A person living under bombardment does not have the same range of choices as a distant policymaker. A conscript threatened with punishment does not exercise power in the same way as the commander giving the order. A displaced community considering armed defence does not face the same moral position as an authority using violence to protect privilege.

Structural analysis therefore helps us avoid false equivalence.

All actors may possess some agency, but they do not possess equal power, equal information, equal safety, or equal responsibility.

This is why violence cannot be judged only by looking at the final act. We must examine:

  • who created the conditions;
  • who possessed alternatives;
  • who controlled resources;
  • who defined the threat;
  • who carried the risk;
  • who benefited;
  • who could refuse;
  • who would be punished for refusing.

Responsibility is relational and differentiated.


Violence and vulnerability

Vulnerability is not the same as weakness.

To be vulnerable is to be exposed to the possibility of harm because human beings depend on bodies, relationships, communities, institutions, infrastructures, and ecological systems that they do not fully control.

We need food produced by others.

We need languages learned from communities.

We need care when we are young, sick, injured, or old.

We depend on roads, water, land, electricity, schools, families, social trust, and political arrangements.

This interdependence makes life possible. It also makes harm possible.

Vulnerability is therefore not an unfortunate defect that strong individuals can completely overcome. It is part of relational existence.

But vulnerability is not distributed equally.

Some people are made more vulnerable through:

  • poverty;
  • displacement;
  • gendered violence;
  • statelessness;
  • racial or ethnic hierarchy;
  • disability;
  • insecure labour;
  • militarization;
  • surveillance;
  • land confiscation;
  • denial of political recognition.

We must therefore distinguish between shared human vulnerability and politically produced vulnerability.

Everyone can be harmed, but not everyone is exposed to harm in the same way.

Some institutions protect certain populations by transferring danger to others. Some economies preserve comfort for one group through exhaustion and insecurity imposed on another. Some states create security at the centre by militarizing the periphery.

A politics of vulnerability must therefore do more than celebrate human interdependence. It must ask who is being required to carry disproportionate risks.


The danger of romanticizing vulnerability

Vulnerability can create possibilities for care, solidarity, and mutual recognition. Recognizing that none of us is fully self-sufficient may weaken fantasies of absolute control.

But suffering does not automatically make people wiser.

Trauma can produce compassion, but it can also produce fear, suspicion, rigidity, revenge, and the desire for a powerful protector. Vulnerability can generate solidarity, but it can also be manipulated by leaders who promise security through exclusion.

We should not ask people to find beauty, wisdom, or meaning in avoidable suffering.

The ethical task is not to glorify vulnerability. It is to prevent vulnerability from becoming abandonment, humiliation, exploitation, or political disposability.

This means building institutions and relationships that:

  • distribute risks more fairly;
  • protect people without infantilizing them;
  • expand agency;
  • allow refusal;
  • reduce dependence on unaccountable authorities;
  • make power answerable for the vulnerability it creates.

Protection should not mean placing a powerful protector above a passive victim. It should mean increasing the collective capacity of people to act, negotiate, organize, survive, and challenge the conditions harming them.

Can violence ever be justified?

A philosophy that refuses absolute answers cannot avoid this question.

There are conditions under which defensive violence may become understandable and possibly justified: when lives are under immediate threat, when domination has closed meaningful alternatives, or when refusing force would allow greater and more systematic harm.

But necessity does not produce innocence.

Violence, even when defensive, tends to alter the people and institutions that organize it. It rewards secrecy, discipline, rapid obedience, centralized authority, simplified narratives, and suspicion toward dissent.

These tendencies may be tactically useful during crisis. They are also politically dangerous.

A resistance movement may need coordination to survive. But the same structures created for survival may later become instruments of domination.

A community may organize armed defence. But armed authority may begin to define who belongs, who speaks, who pays, and who can question leadership.

Violence may interrupt domination while simultaneously creating new concentrations of power.

For this reason, justified violence must remain:

  • specific rather than unlimited;
  • temporary rather than foundational;
  • restrained rather than celebrated;
  • accountable rather than sacred;
  • open to criticism rather than protected by revolutionary identity.

The use of violence should never become proof of virtue, courage, patriotism, masculinity, or political purity.


Violence narrows politics

Violence does more than injure bodies. It changes the conditions of knowledge and political life.

Under violent pressure:

  • uncertainty becomes intolerable;
  • internal criticism looks like betrayal;
  • identities harden;
  • enemies become simplified;
  • urgency replaces deliberation;
  • obedience is rewarded;
  • moral ambiguity becomes dangerous to express.

Violence therefore tends to produce epistemic closure.

The world is divided into loyal and disloyal, hero and traitor, victim and enemy, patriot and collaborator. These categories may help mobilize people quickly. But they also make it difficult to recognize error, internal abuse, or changing circumstances.

The struggle against violence must therefore include a struggle against the certainty that violence produces.

This does not mean demanding detached neutrality from people fighting for survival. It means preserving some internal capacity for questioning:

  • What are we becoming?
  • Who is carrying the greatest harm?
  • Which emergency measures are becoming permanent?
  • Whose criticism are we silencing?
  • What institutions are we building through the way we fight?
  • Are we reproducing the domination we oppose?

These questions are not signs of weakness. They are safeguards against moral and institutional decay.


Peace is not the elimination of vulnerability

A realistic conception of peace does not promise a world in which no one can be injured, betrayed, frightened, or exposed to loss.

Such a promise would require forms of control more violent than the vulnerability they claim to remove.

Absolute security demands total surveillance.

Perfect unity demands the suppression of difference.

Permanent stability demands the elimination of political challenge.

Peace must therefore seek something more modest but more defensible.

Peace is the continuous work of reducing avoidable violence, constraining domination, distributing vulnerability more fairly, and protecting the capacity of people to challenge the conditions governing their lives.

It is not a condition in which conflict disappears.

It is a condition in which conflict does not automatically become a licence for annihilation, dispossession, humiliation, or permanent control.


The structural realist position

Structural realism, as used here, does not mean that structures determine everything or that individuals have no responsibility.

It means that intentions and personal virtue are never enough.

A good person operating inside a harmful institution may reproduce harm. A well-intentioned peace program may strengthen local elites. A defensive organization may develop authoritarian practices. A compassionate leader may still preside over systems that silence criticism.

Structures shape:

  • what choices are available;
  • which behaviours are rewarded;
  • what information becomes visible;
  • who is protected;
  • who is sacrificed;
  • which forms of violence appear legitimate.

But structures are also reproduced, challenged, and transformed through human action.

The relationship is dialectical.

Material conditions constrain institutions.

Institutions shape meanings and behaviour.

Human beings interpret, reproduce, resist, and revise both.

No single level explains violence by itself.


Living with the unresolved tension

The central problem cannot be solved once and for all.

Without force, people may sometimes be unable to survive domination.

With force, resistance may reproduce domination.

Without structures of protection, vulnerable people may be abandoned.

With powerful structures of protection, authority may become unaccountable.

Without solidarity, people face danger alone.

With rigid solidarity, individuals may be forced to sacrifice themselves for the group.

These tensions must not be hidden behind simple slogans.

The responsible position is neither pacifist innocence nor romantic militarism. It is a discipline of restraint, accountability, structural awareness, and continuous self-questioning.

We should seek to build conditions in which violence becomes less necessary, less legitimate, less rewarding, and more difficult to normalize.

We should also build institutions capable of protecting people without treating protection as ownership.

Peace, then, is not the fantasy of invulnerability.

It is the collective capacity to live with vulnerability without allowing it to become a permanent opportunity for domination.