ABSTRACT
This chapter studies the impact of structural violence on communal, acute violence. I define structural violence here, provisionally, as the “extent to which fundamental human needs tend to be frustrated and human development tends to be inhibited as a result of the normal workings of a society’s institutions” (Gil 1986: 129; see also Christie 1997: 315). The connection between structural violence and acute violence seems intuitively evident, but it has not often been explicitly analyzed. In an earlier book on the Rwandan genocide, I studied these relations at the micro-level (Uvin 1998). In this chapter, I set out to examine the relationship between structural and acute violence at a more general, conceptual level, against the backdrop of the globalization of the world political economy. The chapter has two aims then: to analyze the mechanisms by which conditions of structural violence favor eruptions of acute violence (primarily of a communal nature), and to explore the impact of globalization on this process.
