Structural Violence : The Makings of Settler Colonial Impunity

This book explores the structural features of enduring social inequality in the US and other settler colonial societies. In it, philosopher Elena Ruíz tells the story of how epistemic techniques and conceptual schemes developed in antiquity to support the accumulation of wealth generated by the industrial slave system formed the backbone of the colonial project in the Americas. The book traces how these techniques developed through colonial occupation and into the 21st century, and how they affected gender-based violence. Ruíz uses insights from anticolonial thinkers and systems theory to give an account of today''s social oppressions as built into the design of settler colonial social structures and portrays the self-repairing and intentional features of structural violence as central to the ecosystems of impunity in which systemic racism and gendered violence emerge.

Enduring social inequalities in settler colonial societies are not an accident. They are produced and maintained by the self-repairing structural features and dynastic character of systemic racism and its intersecting oppressions. Using methods from diverse anticolonial liberation movements and systems theory, Structural Violence theorizes the existence of adaptive and self-replicating historical formations that underwrite cultures of violence in settler colonial societies. Corresponding epistemic forces tied to profit and wealth accumulation for beneficiary groups often go untracked. The account offered here argues that these epistemic forces play a central role in producing and maintaining massive health inequalities and the maldistribution of disease burdens—including those associated with sexual violence—for marginalized populations. It upends the widespread view that structural racism can be dismantled without addressing gendered violence. It also advocates for a theory of change rooted in reparative action and models of structural competency that respond to the built-in design of structural violence and the ecosystems of impunity that allow it to thrive.