Slow Violence Research Articles

Small hydropower, slow violence, and gendered struggles in Northwest Vietnam

Small hydropower has widely been considered a renewable energy source with minimum adverse social and environmental impacts. However, the expansion of small hydropower in the northwest uplands of Vietnam over the last two decades has created and even normalized persistent and multidimensional water injustice for ethnic minority groups in the region. For some, this expansion has meant persistent, but silent, generational, and cumulative experiences of marginalization and impoverishment as well as the erosion of a way of life. Extractive activities reconstruct identities and redistribute resources and decision-making power, but not without igniting resistance. Local ethnic minority households struggle in negotiating their everyday realities, which are occupied with livelihood maintenance, social interactions, and fights over their use and control of resources. This paper unravels the particular gendered workings in responding to slow violence, drawing on photovoice and over a decade of fieldwork in the northwest uplands where hundreds of small hydrodevelopment projects have been planned and implemented since the early 2000s. The paper argues that the seemingly mundane tasks that women carry out, including cooking, weaving and dyeing fabrics, and growing crops, which are revealed through a gendered perspective to be foundational in cultivating community resilience, self-help, solidarity, resistance, and reworking in the face of ongoing structural injustices and hardships brought about by small hydropower development in Vietnam’s northwest uplands.

Concerning Cars: Automobility and the Contours of Control, Order, and Harm

Criminology has been coincident with the motor age, at least in the Global North. The history of automobility is bound up—in mutually conditioning ways—with changing patterns of crime and social control. Yet the car has remained in relative obscurity as a focus of criminological attention—often present, sometimes investigated as a niche topic but at the same time somehow absent. Against this backdrop, this review describes some key elements of the close relation between automobility and the changing contours of control, order, and harm and offers some preliminary conceptual resources for identifying and investigating the criminological resonances of that most pervasive and mundane of modern objects: the automobile. By treating auto-dominance as a form of slow violence, we can, I argue, make the car into a vehicle for rethinking how to practice criminology in a time of climate breakdown.

Of Roots and Concrete: The “Endz” as Heimat in Caleb Femi’s Poor

ABSTRACT This paper makes the case for a new understanding of home in the city and for the importance of poetry in studies of place. In his collection Poor (2020), the London poet Caleb Femi writes about his ‘endz’, the former North Peckham estate, in striking pastoral, elegiac, even Romantic tones that might seem at odds with the poverty and violence his also describes. This paper — linking Martin Heidegger's ‘poetically man dwells’ with Femi's own poetic home-making and his frequent use of root metaphors — discusses the ‘endz’ as a Heimat: a place, understood as a ‘gathering fourfold’ of earth, sky, mortals and deities (Heidegger 1949), that becomes part of identity. Femi’s poetry shows the deeper, social and personal value of places that, in the globalist and capitalist city, might be razed without consideration. It highlights the slow violence of gentrification perpetrated on individual and communal identities.

Linguistic Vulnerability and Slow Bureaucratic Violence in Institutional Welfare Borderscapes

ABSTRACT Despite the fact that public services in contemporary societies are increasingly marked by language diversity, research on language as a vantage point for understanding social (in)justice in human service work is still scarce. The logic of the neoliberal welfare state emphasises an individual’s responsibility and thus produces a situation where one has to actively claim services, such as interpretation. Drawing on conceptualisations of bureaucratic and slow violence, we examine language barriers as a site for oppression that is intimately linked with other material and symbolic disadvantages. Empirically, we build on a set of qualitative interviews collected in Finland, addressing the role of language in migrants’ experiences of welfare encounters. The analysis shows that language barriers dehumanise and isolate structurally vulnerable non-speakers of dominant languages and produce practices of silence. In this article, we demonstrate that linguistic and structural vulnerabilities and intersectional power asymmetries often create concrete harm and, ultimately, obstacles for substantive citizenship. Moreover, we ask what kind of agency is being produced when complaining actively is not possible and where non-native speakers turn to assistance if their needs are ignored in public welfare service encounters.

Niger Delta Poetry and Traumatic Inscriptions: A Reading of Sophia Obi’s Tears in a Basket

Environmental degradation, beyond being a global phenomenon, is fast becoming a major cause of concern in Africa with severe impacts on humans and non-humans. This mindless exploitation of natural resources, particularly in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria, does not only adversely affect aquatic and terrestrial habitats, making them endangered species, but also leaves scathing impacts on humans, which range from physical to psychological. Previous studies have largely focused on analysing the destructive consequences of environmental degradation on non-humans and the effects on the material well-being of humans in Sophia Obi’s Tears in a Basket. However, this study argues that the destruction of the environment in the Niger Delta region directly affects the psychological and mental health of the inhabitants in the affected communities, causing trauma. Therefore, this study is a critical reading of Sophia Obi’s Tears in a Basket as a narrative of trauma. The study adopts ecocriticism (the study of nature in literature), Stef Craps’ model of trauma theory, which redefines trauma to include unending, quotidian kinds of brutality that befall persons in lower factions, and engages Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence”, which focuses on the accretive, cumulative impact of environmental degradation on marginalised communities. The text is subjected to literary and critical textual analysis to examine its preoccupation with the subject of trauma, through the prisms of individual and collective suffering among the Niger Delta people. The study establishes that environmental degradation possesses the potential to generate trauma.

Go Back!: Reclaiming Indigenous Visibility in Literary, Cultural, and Environmental Spaces of Pakistan

This paper examines the nexus of visibility and violence in the context of indigenous communities of Pakistan, with a focus on the literary works of Mustansar Hussein Tarar. Through a critical analysis of Tarar’s texts, this study reveals how his narratives subvert the dominant autochthonous discourses (surrounding the sociocultural and geophysical spaces of the Indus Valley), reclaim visibility for the indigenous communities, and thus enable their survival. The intersection of literature, culture, and environment has already been explored by many scholars (De Loughery 2015; Mukherjee 2010; Nixon 2011; Huggan 2004), with some discussions also incorporating the perspectives of indigenous peoples (Dove 2006). By drawing upon the nexus of visibility and violence in the context of environmental spaces discussed by Rob Nixon (2011), this research demonstrates how Tarar’s works challenge representational bias against the visibility of indigenous communities and shows slow violence inflicted upon them, thereby mitigating the detrimental effects of centuries of marginalization. To illustrate this argument, I have chosen two novels by Mustansar Hussain Tarar, Sorrows of Sarasvati originally published as Bahao, and Love in the Shade of Death originally published as Qurbat e Marg Mein Muhabbat. Through these works, Tarar traverses both temporally (from the Indus Valley civilization to the present time) and spatially (from Sarasvati to Sindhu), thereby reprobating the current debates of belonging, reimagining the past and present of the Indus Valley through an indigenous lens, and reclaiming visibility for indigenous people within literary, cultural, and environmental spaces in Pakistan. This study contributes to the ongoing eco-critical debates by highlighting the significance of indigenous literary narratives in imagining alternative spatialities.

The intersection of ecology and inequity: postcolonial reflections in oil on water

This study situates Oil on Water within the frameworks of ecocriticism and postcolonial studies, analyzing how the novel portrays ecological harm as both a local and global crisis. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives, the research examines key motifs such as water as a symbol of destruction and renewal, and the role of narrative in fostering ecological awareness and advocating for systemic change. Habila’s novel transcends its fictional context, contributing to the growing discourse on climate justice and sustainability while underscoring the moral imperative to address environmental and social inequities. Helon Habila’s Oil on Water offers a compelling exploration of the socio-environmental crises plaguing the Niger Delta, a region marked by the paradox of resource abundance and ecological devastation. The novel critiques the systemic exploitation of natural resources by multinational corporations and corrupt state actors, highlighting the cascading effects of oil exploration on human lives, landscapes, and cultural heritage. Through vivid depictions of polluted rivers, displaced communities, and poisoned lands, Habila intertwines narratives of environmental degradation with themes of resilience and socio-political injustice. His work aligns with Rob Nixon’s concept of "slow violence," emphasizing the incremental and often invisible destruction caused by environmental exploitation, and with Cajetan Iheka’s focus on the environment as an active participant in African literature.

‘Everywhere’s Burning’: Realising Climate Change and Activism Through Bushfires in Australian Young Adult Literature

As the climate crisis worsens, young people are becoming active ecocitizens and leaders in climate activism. YA literature serves as a safe space for readers to share traumatic experiences and see complex representations of climate anxiety and activism. This article argues that bushfires in Australian YA literature provide a point of access for readers to consider the multi-faceted, global problem of climate change. I examine experiences of climate anxiety, activism, and the devastating effect of climate change through the depiction of bushfires in Helena Fox’s contemporary Australian YA novel, The Quiet and the Loud (2023), set during the 2019-2020 Black Summer bushfires in Australia. These shared experiences enable all readers affected by climate change to engage with the narrative alongside their own story to develop nuanced understandings of the climate crisis and activism. I argue that Fox navigates the complexities of despair and hope in the context of climate change, anxiety, and activism in YA literature through the manifestation of slow violence (hidden, delayed attritional destruction of the environment due to factors such as pollution) and solastalgia (the distress and loss felt due to negative change to a beloved environment). Through her empathetic and cathartic exploration of fire, Fox writes fiction for the Anthropocene generation, making climate change and activism accessible, and empowering young voices and validating their personal experiences.

Slow Violence, Sacrifice, and Survival: Environmental Catastrophe as (Eco)Feminist Freedom in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston makes visible ‘slow violence’ and ‘sacrifice zones’ to establish a feminist future for her protagonist, Janie. The novel shows a fictional rendering of the 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane, a storm that Janie survives. In this article, the Author contends that Janie’s survival of the storm – her surmounting of ‘slow violence’ and bypassing of sacrifice in the ‘sacrifice zone’ – emboldens her to overcome patriarchal violence at the novel’s conclusion. Hurston expresses a gendered writer-activism critiquing not only environmental racism, but the intersectional battles of Black women experiencing environmental and patriarchal violence.

Socio-Ecological Subjectivity in Paschally Mayega’s The People’s Schoolmaster

Abstract Mismanagement of the environment destroys biotic resources including trees, plants, birds, mammals and aquatic species; this forces people to endure contending with material hazards and places human lives at risk. Fiction provides a lens to interrogate the different ways in which environments are imagined, negotiated and used in socio-geographic and political arenas. Mayega’s novella The People’s Schoolmaster problematizes the various factors that victimise humankind ecologically. Relying on Rob Nixon’s concept of ‘slow violence’, I analyse Mayega’s representation of local reactions to global environmental crises; he portrays local publics reacting to political laxity, dishonesty, stinginess and misappropriation of public funds as the major causes of savage environmental destruction.

Slow violence in the micro-regimes of early childhood education

This paper examines inequality among children, demonstrating its gradual emergence within the folds of daily routines in early childhood education (ECE). Employing Rob Nixon’s (2011) concept of slow violence, our focus is on the cumulative impact of practices involving exclusion. Synthesizing Nixon’s framework with Deleuze (1994) and Guattari’s (2000) work, we introduce the concept of micro-regimes in ECE. This approach allows us to comprehend how the intricate interplay of human and non-human elements, spanning various scales, contributes to exclusion and the unfolding of slow violence. We present an ethnographic case study detailing the unintended excluding practices that Azeeb, aged two, faces within a nursery room at a long day care centre in Australia. The results unveil a series of systematic exclusionary acts and illuminate the disjunction between normative pedagogical practices and the material realities of the nursery room, leading to an asynchronous rhythm between the paces of the toddler room and Azeeb. This misalignment gives rise to a series of cumulative exclusionary acts, epitomizing the concept of slow violence as it works at the site of a child.

Toxic Standards : Pollution, ‘Slow Violence’, and the Environmental History of the Abadan Oil Refinery, Iran

Cet article examine l’histoire environnementale de la raffinerie de pétrole d’Abadan, dans la province du Khuzestan, au sud-ouest de l’Iran, de 1912 à 1951. À cette époque, la raffinerie était le centre des opérations de l’Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), aujourd’hui connue sous le nom de BP, et un nœud crucial pour l’approvisionnement en pétrole de l’empire britannique. En lisant à contre-courant les archives de l’entreprise et en s’appuyant sur les « corps d’archives » d’anciens résidents et travailleurs iraniens, l’article apporte deux contributions principals. Tout d’abord, il montre comment la raffinerie a incarné la « colonialité » de la compagnie pétrolière dans sa transformation des écologies locales, la création de nouveaux environnements racialisés et l’effacement épistémique. L’article offre ensuite un aperçu de la manière dont les zones de sacrifice du Nord et du Sud global étaient connectées et où elles ont divergé dans la création de l’Anthropocène. À travers la raffinerie, la pollution a suivi le double standard de l’industrie pétrolière : d’un côté, l’AIOC a standardisé les processus de raffinage en s’alignant sur les raffineries américaines et, de l’autre, elle a fait preuve de la même négligence envers l’environnement local que les compagnies pétrolières américaines. Cependant, l’AIOC est aussi allée plus loin en rendant la toxicité invisible en présentant les problèmes de santé comme endémiques à la société locale. Cela a contribué à maintenir le caractère colonial de la raffinerie lors de la nationalisation du pétrole par le gouvernement iranien en 1951, même si la compagnie pétrolière a été expulsée.

On Indiana: A Disorientation Guide

Abstract Where does the concept “at risk” come from and what does it do and for whom? This essay critiques the ways that discussion of artists and art workers labeled “at risk” tends to focus primarily on moments of extreme crisis, leaving under-studied the “slow violence” of colonial, anti-Black, and neoliberal funding, promotion, retention, and lawfare deployed by museums and universities, as well as the ways that “at-riskness” is marketed and romanticized in the arts. In response, Faye Gleisser, a curator and art historian based in Bloomington, Indiana, fashions a disorientation guide that questions the geographic imaginaries of risk, normalized “frontlines” of crisis, and risk management practices that maintain asymmetrical relations of vulnerability to state-sanctioned violence. In so doing, this disorientation guide argues that the artworld is itself a riskocracy: a regulatory structure that privileges and prioritizes racialized, gendered, and classed notions of “responsible” risk as the mark of genius, value, and leadership, and criminalizes, dismisses, and undermines risk-taking deemed “irreverent” by those in positions of institutional power. One way to begin to study and thereby come to know and undo riskocracy is to recognize its structures and processes of governance. This practice requires pushing against prevalent narrations of risk knowledge and responsive aid that focus on valorizing individual acts of agency within comparative registers of imperial violence and censorship. Through the interlacing of the co-constitutive vulnerabilities experienced by artists and curators—Kelli Morgan, Samia Halaby, Javier Cardona Otero, Lauren Pacheco, and Rebecca Fasman—each with different ties to the central, southern, and northern parts of the state of Indiana, this guide puts pressure on legal and rights-oriented solutions to “at-riskness” and demonstrates how the dismantling of the riskocratic regime of contemporary art requires a collectivized reimagining of “at risk” logics of care.

Food systems in protracted crises: examining indigenous food sovereignty amid de-development in Kashmir.

How do protracted crises shape indigenous food systems, and what are their ramifications for food and nutritional security? Building on decolonial and interdisciplinary research approaches, this paper assesses the consequences of militarised violence for Kashmir's food system. We document the impact of settler-colonialism and conflict-induced agrarian changes on delocalisation of diets. The protracted nature of the crises has two key implications for changes in dietary patterns. First, land control over common land dispossesses the local population and hinders food production. Second, disenfranchisement from (agricultural) land has led to increased reliance on markets that are flooded by imported foods as local production declines. The paper argues that the state plays an important role in food system changes by destroying local patterns of food production and consumption. Slow violence and agrarian de-development serve as tools to de-develop the local food system. Indigenous food cultures form part of everyday resistance and resilience that are operationalised as mitigation and adaptation strategies to address food insecurity.

Decolonisation of education through citizen science: Slow science, not slow violence. The case study Diamonds on the Soles of Their Feet

Citizen science projects are vulnerable to top-down directivity, and driven by assumptions of one-directional ambitions with regard to capacity building and knowledge production. Through the story of Ruth, we discuss how deep-seated legacies of inequality influence the politics of knowledge and explore what we, involved in citizen science projects, could learn from the politics of knowledge as it emerges from decolonisation struggles-particularly as manifested within the academy. Most universities are orientated around Western knowledge regimes that mute many other ways of knowing and ordering the world. Significant inroads have been made when writing on decolonising education but less is known about the effects of the colonisation of state institutions and the disturbances, interferences, and disruptions to organising, sharing, and creating knowledge in public spheres outside of these same universities. These disturbances affect the personal and collective histories of people so that when they are part of research linked to the university, their everyday lives become enmeshed with institutional hegemonies. Research is not dissociated from its deeply entrenched colonial roots. If decolonisation means going deeper into the legitimacy of knowledge and who and how this is being defined, then this must include the process of producing that knowledge outside the bastions of power.

Late modern war and the geos: The ecological 'beforemaths' of advanced military technologies.

This article develops the idea that late modern war's relationship with the geos (the ground and the life it sustains) is doubly destructive. While part of this is recognized in a recent focus on slow violence and ecological aftermaths, there is little consideration of the 'beforemath', or the sites of extraction that make advanced military technologies possible. Drawing attention to mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the article connects military technologies to arms manufacturers and their use of extracted minerals (e.g. cobalt, tantalum, copper, uranium). Shared patterns of environmental and public health effects across parts of Iraq, Gaza and the DRC indicate the doubly destructive nature of late modern war's relationship with the geos: toxic materials threaten life after war as the deposits of bombardment and before war as mineral commodities at the beginning of arms supply chains. The article explicates how a perspective from the beforemath radically refigures the ways we think about war and spatiality, temporality, and the range of bodies affected in ways that promise a fuller understanding of the violence distributed by practices of late modern war.

Pesticide Use and Civil Rights in Central California: Slow Violence and the State

This article presents the findings of the People’s Tribunal on Pesticide Use and Civil Rights (Lindsay, California, September 2023) which provides a nuanced account of the mechanisms by which the state perpetuates/organizes limited response to environmental harms. We apply a “slow violence” lens to community testimony, further informed by interviews and focus groups in English and Spanish, which included officials, scientists focusing on pesticide use and exposure, community leaders, and farmworkers. “Slow violence” illuminates practices and institutions that sustain, routinize, and normalize suffering over time. Ongoing and pervasive civil rights violations on farms and in agricultural communities are only identifiable via slow observation and differ from the “disparate impact” frame of civil rights practice in environmental law. Our results call for social scientists and legal scholars to revisit claims of intentional discrimination rather than disparate impact and point to the potential for civil rights enforcement by state agencies.

Slow resistance: Feminist and queer activism in ‘illiberal’ contexts

In recent years in China, NGO activism, street gatherings, and the direct expression of gender and sexual rights have been curtailed, yet paradoxically, online feminist expression and organizing, as well as gay visibility, are happening on an unprecedented scale. Inspired by the notions of slow violence and slow hope, this article proposes the concept of slow resistance in relation to ‘illiberalism’ to think through this paradox. Analyzing recent rich and multifaceted, yet often overlooked, feminist activism in China as an example of slow resistance, the article considers slow resistance in ‘illiberal’ contexts as characterized by its context-dependent (in)visibility due to censorship and limitations in global knowledge production and information circulation. Furthermore, slow resistance can be used to understand activism on a global and transnational scale, beyond the oversimplified liberal/illiberal binary. This binary often fails to capture the complexity of political shifts and social changes within ‘illiberal’ contexts. Moreover, the concept of slow resistance challenges the understanding of power solely as state power and resistance solely as opposition to state power. Developing the concept within feminist activism also highlights the importance of gender and sexual politics in understanding social and political change. Slow resistance offers an indeterminate temporality of resistance that challenges narratives of progress in modernization projects and narratives of decline and despair often associated with ‘illiberal states.’ It is important to note that an excessive emphasis on state oppression or illiberal tendencies may paradoxically hinder, rather than facilitate, the potential for (slow) resistance in such contexts.

Feeling Carcerality: How Carceral Seepage Shapes Racialized Emotions

Abstract This article examines how young people experience policing and reveals the emotional weight of the carceral state. Drawing on interviews and focus groups with over forty Black and non-Black Latinx young men in Los Angeles County, I argue that the racialized emotions the young men allude to do not stem from one individual encounter with the police or any single identifiable source. Instead, they are responses to the ongoing violence of what I describe as carceral seepage: witnessing the policing of loved ones and peers, the omnipresence of police, and the vulnerability of being criminalized across social contexts (schools, healthcare settings, neighborhood settings, etc.). Integrating theories on racialized emotions and the slow violence of policing, I use carceral seepage to show the breadth of the carceral state and demonstrate how it elicits a particular set of racialized emotional responses (or racialized emotions).

Narrating Ecopolitics and the Poetics of Slow Violence in Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were

Abstract In her second novel How Beautiful We Were (2021), the Cameroonian-American writer Imbolo Mbue addresses the devastating environmental and human consequences of Big Oil on a community in a fictional African setting. In this article I investigate the power of narratives to evoke environmental injustice and discuss the narrative strategies and dominant themes employed in this ‘oil novel’ to depict the violent disruptions experienced by the environment and the members of the community. While my reading is guided by insights gained from the work of a number of postcolonial environmental critics, several of the concepts proposed by Rob Nixon (2011) have proven especially useful. More precisely, in this article I explore issues such as the power of literary representation and narrative strategies, the impact of colonial legacies and post-independence conditions, neo-colonial realities of toxic imperialism, and their repercussions on cultural identity and environmental integrity.