Community Psychology and war: Structural violence and institutional silence

This chapter begins and ends with a reflection on a moment when I anxiously presented a keynote presentation to a Community Psychology conference on the topic of violence and war. I asked the discipline whether it had a serious problem in dealing with violence. In this chapter I unpack that moment by first considering how violence is defined and how Community Psychology has typically focused on interpersonal violence. I then describe structural violence to more fully capture the nature of violence experienced by people who lack social power and how a fuller understanding of the violence of war could benefit Community Psychology. I then consider how academic institutions are marked by the features of structural violence and consider whether Community Psychology has been compromised into silence on structural violence as a result. I conclude by offering a way forward for Community Psychology that is underpinned by a more consistent focus on social institutions, hierarchies of social power and on understanding social policies as forms of social sanction that are enacted against socio-economically distressed and disadvantaged people.