Structural Violence

This book explores the structural features of enduring social inequality in the US and other settler colonial societies. In it, philosopher Elena Ruz 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. Ruz 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.