Pondering Violence and Galtung’s Triangle:

• In Event: 50662 - Section on Peace, War, and Social Conflict Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 1: Conflict and Theory

Abstract

Johan Galtung’s violence triangle and his concept of structural violence have had a dramatic impact on our understanding of violence, so I asked him about its origins. “The inspiration was completely linguistic from subject-free languages,” Japanese and Chinese. I have tried to understand, expand, and apply his pathbreaking paradigm, adding ecoviolence to his structural, cultural, and direct violence, and shifting to the metaphor of a web from a triangle because it is more dynamic. I do a brief systematic review of how scholars have used his work, then discuss how we might further elaborate an analysis of violence and a move to nonviolence with the web of nonviolence as a theoretical framework.

Author

• Lester R. Kurtz, George Mason University