Tag: Political Violence

Climate Change

Carbon-neutrality is dead.
So, now what?

After carbon-neutrality was declared an official goal in the 2015 Paris Agreement it became fashionable for governments and corporations to declare their intention to become carbon neutral by 2050 or soon thereafter. This was never more than an empty promise, however. The deadline was set far enough in the future to make immediate action unnecessary and few if any governments or corporations ever accepted a realistic plan to actually achieve carbon-neutrality. A decade later, they have largely given up pretense. Some have officially given up the goal; others have silently voided or discarded it. Of course, carbon-neutrality by 2050 was...
Social Issues

If structural violence is so entrenched that personal violence is the only effective response, then personal violence is an appropriate response.

That (i.e., the title of this short piece) is really all I wanted to say, but probably, some explanation is in order. Let’s start with the notions of β€œstructural” and β€œpersonal violence”, which were introduced by Johan Galtung in 1969: Violence with a clear subject-object relation is manifest because it is visible as action. It corresponds to our ideas of what drama is, and it is personal because there are persons committing the violence. […] Violence without this relation is structural, built into structure. Thus, when one husband beats his wife there is a clear case of personal violence, but...