This reflection is based on Dr. Tonya Haynes’ teach-in, “What is Structural Violence”1, and builds on her framing to examine feminist, anti-colonial, and abolitionist possibilities for naming, unpacking, and dismantling everyday systems of violence. 

Introduction

November is a month of profound moments of feminist mobilisations across the world – the global 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence2, the Marcha das Mulheres Negras3 in Brazil, and the organising of women environmental defenders at COP30.4 We write this article to commemorate these converging struggles and to reflect on how they label and challenge the systemic patterns of harm inflicted on the lives, bodies, and territories of women and gender diverse people in the Global South.

In this moment, the lens of structural violence, drawn from Dr. Tonya Haynes, offers an analytical tool. It enables us to move beyond understanding incidents of violence as isolated events and instead recognise it as historical, political, economic, and ecological arrangements that systematically shape inequality, neglect, and disposability.

The 16 Days of Activism against gender-based violence is a global campaign dedicated to ending gender-based violence against women and gender diverse people. The campaign5 was launched by a group of feminist activists at the inauguration of the Center for Women’s Global Leadership in 1991, as a commemorative response to the 1960 assassination of the Mirabal sisters. The sisters, who became symbols of the feminist movement across Latin America, known as “the butterflies”, were murdered for resisting the authoritarian regime of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic.6

The Marcha das Mulheres Negras7 organises Black women in Brazil to denounce racism, state abandonment, and to claim the right to live well (Buen Vivir)8. And at COP309, women environmental defenders confront extractivism, climate coloniality, and what we understand as environmental and climate violence: the structural harms produced through pollution, land dispossession, toxic exposure, and the sacrificial treatment of certain territories and peoples.

Across these mobilisations, we see that violence in its different shapes and forms is structural, produced through co-constitutive systems of colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, and ecological exploitation. Guided by Tonya Haynes’ writings and her Political Education teach-in session What is Structural Violence?10, we invite you to unpack together: What do we mean by structural violence? How does it manifest in our bodies and territories? How has the colonial gender system been historically structured through violence? How do we envision feminist, anticolonial, abolitionist, and reparative futures?

A case of abandonment: Ramona Medina’s story

During the first Covid lockdown in Buenos Aires’ Villa 31 (Argentina), community organiser Ramona Medina ran her neighbourhood kitchen. The water had stopped flowing for days. Ramona publicly asked how people could “maintain hygiene” with no access to water. Weeks later, she died of Covid.11

Ramona’s death was not accidental. It reflected systemic forms of abandonment: lack of sanitation, privatised and inaccessible healthcare, and the disposability of racialised and poor communities. As Dr. Haynes reminds us, violence is not always spectacular or visible. Often, it is what Johan Galtung called the “tranquil waters” of everyday life12: the silent systems that determine who eats, who works, who receives care, and who lives.

Ramona’s story reflects the core of Haynes’ analysis: structural violence is like the surroundings, like the weather – present daily and made to feel natural. Structural violence is not just about individual experiences of inequalities, but about the harmful systems that reproduce themselves as normal and natural. As Haynes notes, it appears “about as natural as the air around us.”

Not accidental: Structural violence as engineered inequality

In her teach-in, Dr.Haynes explains, “Structural violence is about how life chances get distributed. It is systematic, institutionalised, and everyday violence”. She revisits Johan Galtung’s framing of violence as that which increases the distance between the “potential and the actual”.13

Haynes shows us how inequality is not incidental, but engineered. When medical care is available for some and not for others; when decisions about resources, climate and environment governance are made in places far from rural, Afro-indigenous, and impoverished communities who are not included in their making, and when entire communities have to survive or die in scarcity – it is violence that is systematically embedded in design.

“This could mean that everything from access to transportation and schools to health centers and hospitals become structural conditions that are individually impossible to overcome,” illustrates Dr. Haynes.

Haynes unpacks Paul Farmer’s analysis of structural violence as both “structured and structuring”, which “constricts the agency of its victims. It tightens a physical noose around their necks, and this determines the way in which resources such as food, medicine, even affection are allocated and experienced.”(p.315)14

This analysis shows us how histories of enslavement, colonisation, and extraction continue to shape who is healthy, free, or disposable. Haynes illustrates this with the tweet from the British Treasury in 2018 that said that slavery compensation bonds were only fully repaid in 2015, which means that descendants of enslaved people were, through taxes, paying off “debts owed” to enslavers.15 The repercussions of enslavement were “apparently not so buried in the past after all.” 

Structural Violence: The reproduction of historical hierarchies 

Haynes insists that any analysis of structural violence must also be an analysis of history. “Interventions also must be structural”, she explains. 

“This analysis of structural violence requires an understanding of the histories that very often must be hidden, occluded, distorted, or denied for these unequal relations of power to normalise and naturalise themselves, to escape and evade all attempts at critique and intervention.”

She turns to Caribbean scholar V. Eudine Barriteau who reminds us that there is no “contemporary” in feminist issues.16 Haynes elaborates, “There is no 2023 feminist issue that was not a feminist issue 50 years ago. Rather, there is a recurring, repeating, refracting past that masquerades as the modern and reproduces a fractured contemporary.”

For Haynes, structural analysis demands that we remember that history is not behind us – it is in us, alive in the present. The recurring past continues to shape our political and material realities. Structural violence, then, is the ongoing reproduction of historical hierarchies that continue to define whose lives are protected, whose labour is extracted, and whose deaths are rationalised.

The politics of life and death: Structural violence and hierarchies of humanity

Tonya Haynes calls on us “to attend to the dead, to the dying, to the left for dead, the marked for death, the worked to death, the deselected and the disposable”,  or what is known as necropolitics.17 She urges us to think about how we live, how life chances are distributed, and about who gets to live a long, healthy life. The work of attending to the dead and the dying, then, is also the work of confronting how colonialism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy decide who is made to live and who is made to die. 

Tonya grounds her framing in Jamaican novelist and philosopher Sylvia Wynter’s work and other traditions of thinking about structural violence, situating it within a longer genealogy of critique of how entire categories of people have been deselected from the category of “human” itself.18

“Indigenous ways of knowing and living are not supported – they are actively undermined through land dispossession and the executions of Indigenous activists. We have to think seriously about the Indigenous in the Americas, and beyond, across the Global South. If we are to understand the different ways structural violence manifests, for me, it begins with recognising that the category of the human is a founded one – it excludes, and only lets you in on certain terms. From that exclusion flows our economic philosophies, our relations with others, our gender ideologies, our systems of race, racism, and exclusion. All of these are bound up in the invention of the human – in this singular way of thinking that says: this is the only way to be.”

And thus, structural violence is about the hierarchies of “humanness” that shape everything: health, worth, and survival itself.

Gender as a colonial matrix of power: Violence, structure and the invention of the “human” 

Tonya Haynes names gender as one of the structures that organise life chances. She draws on Elizabeth Frazer and Kimberly Hutchings’ work on gender as a compulsory binary category and in itself a form of violence.19

“​​Gender as a compulsory, binary organising category – so central to how we organise societies, economies, and labour forces – is itself a form of violence, precisely because it constricts.” 

Building on this, Haynes analyses the invention of “the human” in Western modernity that excluded Black, Indigenous, trans populations, from which flowed economic systems, race hierarchies, and gender ideologies that continue to shape life chances today.

Feminist decolonial theorists from the South have been pioneers in critically unpacking this gendered matrix of dehumanisation imposed by the Western colonial modernity. As Latin American theorist María Lugones, argues20:

“Since the European colonisation of the Americas and the Caribbean, a dichotomous and hierarchical distinction between the human and the non-human was imposed upon the colonised in service of the Western man. This distinction, accompanied by other hierarchical differences – including that between men and women – became the marker of what was considered human and civilised, as opposed to non-human, animalistic, and savage. Only the ‘civilised’ were recognised as men and women, while Indigenous peoples of the Americas and enslaved Africans were classified as non-human in their very species.” (p.743)

Lugones further says, “the imposition of this gender system was as constitutive of the coloniality of power as the coloniality of power was constitutive of it (p.202)” – and argues that “gender itself is a colonial introduction, a violent introduction consistently and contemporarily used to destroy peoples, cosmologies, and communities as the building ground of the “civilised” West.” (p.186)21

Taken together, these insights show how the colonial imposition of gender invades every domain: social relations, ecology, economy, governance, spirituality, knowledge systems, and the everyday practices through which we either care for the world or contribute to its destruction. Structural violence is therefore, always gendered and racialised. It is at work when care work is made invisible or devalued, when trans women are excluded from ideas of “womanhood”, and when women’s unpaid labour sustains economies hollowed by austerity.

Structural violence needs structural resistance 

Haynes reminds us that resisting capitalist, neoliberal, colonial, and patriarchal structures requires structural rather than adaptive responses:

“It’s not about how we could adapt, or we could become more resilient, but rather, how might we imagine different kinds of futures and how might the institutions that are responsible for, that are benefiting from, and actively seek to maintain these kinds of structural violence pay for rebuilding, reparations and restitution”.

While some feminist movements across the Global South have long developed systemic analyses, tools, and visions for the sustainability of life – work that exposes how oppression is organised and offers pathways for dismantling it – this approach is still far from mainstream. At South Feminist Futures, we work with the intention that more feminist movements and activists could include this structural lens into their everyday practice and analyses. We invite you to a deeper exploration of the architecture of structural violence through through this brief selection of movements, frameworks, and concepts:

  • Climate justice and ecofeminism: Territorial defenders resisting extractivism, climate colonialism, and environmental racism, and advancing reparatory visions like Buen Vivir. See Farhana Sultana on climate coloniality26, Andrea Santos Baca on ecofeminism27, Vandana Shiva on the violences of the Green Revolution28, and South Feminist Futures on food sovereignty struggles.29
  • Disability justice movements: Building infrastructures of care, interdependence, access, abolition, and anti-eugenic futures. Explore thinkers like Mia Mingus, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Patty Berne or Alice Wong, and view Disability justice feminist movement proposals like Sins Invalid’s 10 principles of Disability Justice.31

  • Conceptual and methodological tools: Rita Segato on the production of violence and its elementary structures32; the Latin American body-territory mapping methodology by Colectivo Miradas Críticas del Territorio desde el Feminismo33; Patricia Hill Collins on the matrix of domination34; Kimberly Crenshaw on intersectionality, mapping power and violence35; Audre Lorde on the interconnections among systems of oppression36; and Françoise Vergès on decolonial analyses of  violence.37

Structural thinking requires us not only to critique the present but to imagine the worlds we need. Inspired by feminist environmental defenders, Black feminist organisers, and decolonial movements across the Global South, we invite you to build this future with us – one that is grounded in reparations, abolition, care, and the collective refusal of disposability.

Check out our curated reading list that gathers Global South feminist works exploring how structural violence – economic, colonial, gendered, racial – shapes bodies, territories and systems.

Written by Agustina Calcagno, Debarati Das, and Camila Costa (SFF Knowledge Base Team)

References

  1. South Feminist Futures. (2023, March 1). Teach-In 4: What is structural violence? https://southfeministfutures.org/teach-in-4-what-is-structural-violence/
  2. Center for Women’s Global Leadership. 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence Campaign. Rutgers University. https://cwgl.rutgers.edu/component/content/article/398-16-days-campaign?Itemid=120&catid=78
  3. Marcha das Mulheres Negras. (2025, October). Manifesto Econômico da Marcha das Mulheres Negras 2025. https://marchadasmulheresnegras.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Manifesto-Economico-da-Marcha-das-Mulheres-Negras-2025.pdf
  4. Escuela Feminista para la Acción Climática.(2025). Statement towards COP30. https://escuelafeminista.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Pronunciamientos-EFAC-ingles.pdf
  5. Center for Women’s Global Leadership. 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence Campaign. Rutgers University. https://cwgl.rutgers.edu/component/content/article/398-16-days-campaign?Itemid=120&catid=78
  6. Escales, V. (2021, November 25). Derrotar al tirano: las Mirabal. LatFem. https://latfem.org/derrotar-al-tirano-las-mirabal/
  7. Ibid.
  8. Marcha das Mulheres Negras. Manifesto Econômico da Marcha das Mulheres Negras. https://marchadasmulheresnegras.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Manifesto-Economico-da-Marcha-das-Mulheres-Negras-2025.pdf 
  9. Escuela Feminista para la Acción Climática.(2025). Statement towards COP30. https://escuelafeminista.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Pronunciamientos-EFAC-ingles.pdf 
  10. South Feminist Futures. (2023, March 1). Teach-In 4: What is structural violence? https://southfeministfutures.org/teach-in-4-what-is-structural-violence/
  11. Articulación Marco Sur.(2020). “Argentina: El acceso al agua, otro derecho humano por el que luchar”. https://www.mujeresdelsur-afm.org/argentina-acceso-agua-derecho-humano-luchar-mataron-ramona/
  12. Galtung, J. (1969). Violence, peace, and peace research. Journal of Peace Research, 6(3), 167–191. https://www2.kobe-u.ac.jp/~alexroni/IPD%202015%20readings/IPD%202015_7/Galtung_Violence,%20Peace,%20and%20Peace%20Research.pdf
  13. Ibid.
  14. Farmer, P. (2004). An anthropology of structural violence. Current Anthropology, 45(3). https://doi.org/10.1086/382250 
  15. Niles, B. (2018, February 27). UK slavery tweet rekindles Caribbean reparations bid. CGTN. https://news.cgtn.com/news/77457a4d35677a6333566d54/index.html
  16. Barriteau, V. E. (Ed.). (2003). Confronting power, theorizing gender: Interdisciplinary perspectives in the Caribbean. University of the West Indies Press. https://www.uwipress.com/9789766401368/confronting-power-theorizing-gender/
  17. For a further exploration on the “Necropolitics” concept see Sayak Valencia book called “Gore Capitalism”, “The Right To Maim” by Jasbir K. Puar or “Necropolitics” by Achille Mbembe. 
  18. Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after Man, its over-representation—An argument. CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257-337. https://law.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/2432989/Wynter-2003-Unsettling-the-Coloniality-of-Being.pdf
  19. Frazer, E., & Hutchings, K. (2019). The feminist politics of naming violence. Feminist Theory, 21(2), 199-216. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700119859759 (Original work published 2020)
  20. Lugones, M. (2010). Toward a Decolonial Feminism. Hypatia, 25(4), 742–759. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40928654 
  21. Lugones, M. (2007). Heterosexualism and the Colonial / Modern Gender System. Hypatia, 22(1), 186–209. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4640051 
  22. SFU Public Square. (2022, September 23). Angela Davis and Gina Dent | Abolition Feminism: Dreaming a New Reality [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urjluhp0MVM 
  23. South Feminist Futures. (2025, April 29). Teach-In 22: Beyond Criminalisation: Rethinking Justice, Law and the State. https://southfeministfutures.org/teach-in-22-beyond-criminalisation-rethinking-justice-law-and-the-state/
  24. YoNoFui. https://yonofui.org.ar/
  25. Red Feminista Anticarcelaria de América Latina. https://feministasanticarcelarias.org/
  26. Sultana, F. (2023). What is Climate Coloniality? South Feminist Futures Knowledge Hub. https://knowledgehub.southfeministfutures.org/kb/what-is-climate-coloniality/
  27. South Feminist Futures. (2023, January 27). Teach-In 3: What is Ecofeminism? https://southfeministfutures.org/teach-in-3-what-is-ecofeminism/
  28. Shiva, V. (2016). The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology, and Politics. University Press of Kentucky. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt19dzdcp 
  29. South Feminist Futures. Rural women, food sovereignty and the struggle for life and self-determination. https://southfeministfutures.org/rural-women-food-sovereignty-and-the-struggle-for-life-and-self-determination/
  30. Learn about Marcha Das Mulheres Negras, their history and political proposal here: https://marchadasmulheresnegras.com.br/
  31. Sins Invalid. 10 Principles of Disability Justice. https://sinsinvalid.org/10-principles-of-disability-justice/
  32. Segato, R. L. Las estructuras elementales de la violencia: Contrato y estatus en la etiología de la violencia. Colectiva Justicia Mujer. https://colectivajusticiamujer.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/estructura_vg-rita_segato.pdf
  33. Colectivo Miradas Críticas del Territorio desde el Feminismo. (2017). Mapeando el cuerpo-territorio: Guía metodológica para mujeres que defienden sus territorios. Territorio y Feminismos. https://territorioyfeminismos.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/mapeando-el-cuerpo-territorio.pdf
  34. Collins, P. H. Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. https://negrasoulblog.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/patricia-hill-collins-black-feminist-thought.pdf
  35. Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color. Stanford Law Review, 43(6), 1241–1299. https://doi.org/10.2307/1229039 
  36. Lorde, A. (1984). Sister outsider: Essays and speeches. https://rhinehartibenglish.weebly.com/uploads/2/2/1/0/22108252/sister_outsider_audrey_lorde_ib_pdf_packet.pdf
  37. Vergès, F. (2022). A feminist theory of violence: A decolonial perspective (M. Thackway, Trans.). Pluto Press. https://www.plutobooks.com/product/a-feminist-theory-of-violence/

Agustina Calcagno (she/her) is an Argentinian feminist activist for social change and climate justice active in her country’s feminist movement. Her history of engagement in research and social projects related to technology, popular education, gender and environmental issues, specifically with Global South social movements, networks, NGOs and peasant and indigenous communities in Latin America is complemented by a political science degree from the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), and a master’s degree in strategies and technologies for development from Universidad Complutense Madrid.  In addition to her role at SFF, she facilitates and accompanies women environmental defenders in the Gran Chaco Argentino region in their campaigns and is a member of the Gender Committee of Argentina’s Land National Engagement Strategy. Agustina is also a trainer at the Latin American School for Climate Action. She is motivated by her belief in the potential and power of organised, intergenerational, intercultural South Feminists working in solidarity to tackle capitalism and gain and maintain liberation that is sustainable and in harmony with nature.

Debarati Das (they/them) is a queer non-binary feminist based in India. As the Knowledge and Research Programme Assistant at South Feminist Futures, they work to build, enhance, and sustain the Knowledge Hub to support Southern feminist activism. Their work has primarily centered women, queer and trans persons, and disabled individuals’ experiences of online harms and freedoms. Their interest lies in reimagining digital worlds through anti-colonial, feminist and queer lenses, where technology becomes a site of resistance, solidarity, creativity, and collective transformation. They’re curious about infrastructures of memory: how technologies, archives, and epistemologies shape what is remembered, who is heard, and whose knowledge counts. Currently, they’re an independent consultant also working in the areas of technology research and anti-colonial tech.

Camila Costa (she/her) is a feminist and anti-capitalist archivist raised in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In the archival field, her work and research are deeply connected to personal archives, community archives and fundamental rights. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Archival Science, a specialisation in Archives and Human Rights, a master’s and a PhD in Information Science. She has worked as a teacher and researcher in Archival Science and as a professional archivist. She’s interested in the feminist ethics of care theory and how it can transform archival practices – from the way we describe and preserve records to how we care for communities and knowledge itself. She believes archiving can be a transformative, political and ethical act – one that can help sustain collective memory, justice, and solidarity.