A quiet kind of harm you can miss in one glance
A student reads a headline about a war and thinks, that’s violence. Then they look up and see a different kind of damage: a community with no clinic, a school that never opens, a job market that never hires. No one is throwing punches. No bombs are falling. But life still gets smaller.
That’s structural violence -- and in IB Global Politics, it’s one of the most exam-useful concepts because it helps you explain how harm can be produced by the “normal” design of society.
What is structural violence (definition for IB Global Politics)?
Structural violence is harm caused by social, political, and economic structures that systematically block people from meeting basic needs or achieving life chances. It is typically:
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Indirect (no clear attacker)
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Systemic (built into institutions and rules)
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Normalized (it can look “ordinary”)
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Long-term (its effects accumulate across years)
A quick way to phrase it in IB Global Politics essays: structural violence is violence embedded in systems, producing avoidable suffering through inequality.
For clean exam phrasing, you can cross-check the term in the IB Global Politics glossary.
