Three Forms of Violence and Their Responses | Antonino Drago

Johan Galtung gave his definitive formulation of the three forms of violence—direct, structural, and cultural—in 1990 with the publication of his essay "Cultural Violence" in the Journal of Peace Research. Direct violence is what everyone readily understands: a slap, an insult, an act of aggression, a theft, or a physical assault. How can we respond positively? Calmly, with empathy, with a creative response that releases tension, etc. In short, everything taught in nonviolence training.

» Today, we encounter the violence of science. «

 
Structural violence is more difficult to identify: an unemployed person doesn't realize that in Strasbourg, unemployment is deliberately engineered to ensure that manufacturers always have an abundant workforce; someone who deposits money in a bank doesn't realize that their money will fuel a financial system that allows for speculation hundreds, even thousands, of times over the basic material goods of the poorest people in the world.

 

Those who join the army to find employment fail to realize that they become complicit in the panorama of death that surrounds us and which, along with nuclear deterrence, threatens humanity with suicide. We must therefore be careful not to forget what Shantidas always emphasized: structural sin, in the face of which individual sins lose their meaning. The only commandment he mentions is “Thou shalt not kill,” in order to call for conversion in the face of war, understood as the exemplary form of structural violence. Shantidas helped to unmask structural violence when, in the 1950s, he denounced the greatest structural violence of his time: the Two Blocs that dominated the world and were complementary (The Four Plagues, 1959, §§ 1-24). 

 

How can we respond effectively to this? One can try to do so instinctively, but structures are precisely impervious to such reactions. For example, the programmers in Strasbourg have the police at their disposal to suppress protests. One can respond on an emotional level by speaking with the utmost empathy to a person in charge. But at best, the person in charge might change their mind, while the structure would persist.

Ordinary people are incapable of developing a social analysis suited to the situation created by the social structure; indeed, a structure dominates because people generally ignore the complexity of a social structure. It is through this superiority that structures defend themselves. So, to respond effectively to them, it is necessary to establish a clear and precise analysis of the situation. In conclusion, a response is needed that appeals not only to our humanity, but also to the intelligence capable of adapting our energies to the weaknesses of the situation; otherwise, we strike where there is no nail.

 

Finally, there is cultural violence, even more subtle and less perceptible, but no less disastrous than the other two. Here too, Galtung, in my humble opinion, was unclear when he defined it as the support that culture provides to structural violence. Of course, this violence exists: for example, the violence of consumerist propaganda, which supports commercial capitalism; or the scholastic violence that fails to denounce the existing power system. But there is more: autonomous cultural violence that claims to have no alternatives. Consider, for example, the ideological violence of the Church, which declared anyone who read the Gospel in the vernacular a heretic (see the Waldensians), or the violence of money, which assigns a value to everything according to its price. It is this violence that Les Nouvelles de l'Arche highlights when it devotes an issue to racism or patriarchy. This violence is pervasive.

Therefore, to detect it and ultimately avoid it, we must pay particular attention to it. Today, we encounter the violence of science: the idea that science imposes itself upon the mind as humanity's inevitable path. There is also the violence of technology, which invades our human world as an irreversible advance. As early as the 1950s, Lanza del Vasto made a significant contribution to the fight against this type of violence, denouncing it as the greatest violence of our time. In his era, this violence only affected the external world of human beings—radio, television, automobiles, etc.

Today, it has reached its full potential: artificial intelligence is capable of revolutionizing human civilization, to the point of inspiring transhumanism or raising fears of a hierarchy of robots dominating humanity. It will halve the number of available jobs in a short time, revolutionize the education system, create a state secret service a thousand times more powerful than James Bond, and fill all the gaps in the existing arsenal with new weapons. Today, anyone who has grown up with a smartphone has been connected to AI since childhood.

 

According to the text of Revelation 13, the wisdom necessary for escape lies in the ability to name these things—first and foremost, modern science. And Shantidas has given this violence a name: the quest for the infinite, not the infinity of human relationships, but the infinity of the animal world, the infinite number of things to enjoy, the infinite number of social structures in which to participate, and finally, the infinite potential of human (and artificial) intelligence waiting to be discovered. The key to liberation is a "return to the obvious" of human nature in its simplicity and direct human relationships. In conclusion:

 

► the nonviolent response to direct violence is creativity in human relationships;
► the response to structural violence requires understanding the situation;
► the nonviolent response to cultural violence requires being in the world without being of the world—that is, in the incessant and, through artificial intelligence, increasingly penetrating noise of modernity, turning back toward one's own soul and fighting every absolutism and every claim of irreversible progress.

Just as Gandhi and Shantidas did in their respective times.
 

Quoted from:

Antonino Drago (August 15, 2026) - The Three Forms of Violence and Their Responses.

Antonino Drago (b. 1938) is a professor at the University of Naples Federico II, Italy, and a member of the TRANSCEND Network. An ally of the Ark Community, he teaches at the TRANSCEND Peace University (TPU). He holds a master's degree in physics from the University of Pisa (1961) and is a follower of the Community of the Ark, founded by Gandhi's Italian disciple Lanza del Vasto. A conscientious objector, Drago participated in Italy's campaigns for conscientious objection (1964–1972) and for refusing to pay taxes used to finance military expenditure (1983–2000). Drawing on his extensive experience and writings on these subjects, he taught Nonviolent Popular Defense in the University of Pisa's "Science for Peace" curriculum (2001–2012), as well as Peacebuilding and Peacekeeping (2009–2013), and History and Techniques of Nonviolence in the University of Florence's "Operations of Peace" curriculum (2004–2010). In 2004–2005, Drago served as the first president of the Italian Ministerial Committee for Promoting Unarmed and Nonviolent Civil Defense.