Slow violence

Gala Arias Rubio

The term ‘slow violence’ was coined by the South African ecologist Rob Nixon in 2011 to describe slow-progressing processes that negatively impact the health and socioeconomic development of a population over a period of years or decades. Although the term ‘slow violence’ does not refer exclusively to environmental damage, many processes that fall under this concept have an ecological dimension (see Ecological Damage). The purpose of coining this term was to highlight those processes that are usually hidden from public opinion because they are an organic consequence of the capitalist system. Furthermore, they lack the effectiveness and attention that conventional systems of violence, such as war, generate (see Capitalism and the Ecological Crisis).

This term relates to other previously coined concepts that refer to processes of progressive damage to living conditions or to the perpetuation of injustices that are not determined by the use of violence as we know it (direct, acute, fast and visible). One such term is the concept of ‘structural violence ‘, coined by Johan Galtung in the 1960s. Structural violence specifically refers to the characteristics of some political and economic systems that favor exclusion and discrimination, perpetuating inequality. For example, this could involve hindering access to an efficient public health system for sectors of the population.

There are many examples that clearly illustrate the concept of slow violence. Many of these are associated with colonial processes in the Global South, but there are also many examples in developed countries. Climate change and biodiversity loss are probably the two most significant examples of slow violence because they are both slow-developing processes that have a very negative impact on regions and societies that are least responsible for them. Furthermore, they cause deaths that are rarely recognised as being directly related to these phenomena. Nevertheless, there are many other examples that can be used to illustrate this concept. The Bhopal disaster in India in 1984 is one such example. It was caused by a gas leak from an industrial complex used for producing pesticides, resulting in more than 25,000 deaths and 500,000 injuries. This disaster had huge immediate and long-term consequences, affecting even the second generation — people who were not born when the disaster occurred — who suffer from respiratory, neurological and reproductive health problems, and who must deal with the consequences of soil and groundwater pollution. (See Ecosocial Determinants of Health).

It is important to clarify that, as in some other examples, we do not consider the catastrophic event itself to be slow violence, because it caused a massive number of deaths and injuries immediately. Rather, it is the time-extended consequences that we call slow violence. Bhopal is an ongoing disaster in which victims have not received the necessary economic compensation from the corporations responsible for the factory, such as Union Carbide and Dow Chemical. Nobody was held responsible for what happened. One of the tragedy’s survivors, Leela Bai, concludes: “A foreign company came to our country to make a profit but [they did so] at a cost to us, poor and vulnerable people. They got away because we are poor (…)” (quoted in Tulika Bansal’s, 2025, article). Rob Nixon (2011, p. 4) mentions ‘disposable people’ as one of the key elements of slow violence and points out that the damage caused by slow violence accumulates, affecting poorer or marginalised communities due to racial, religious or class issues, with consequences that can be perceived over a range of temporal scales (Nixon, 2011, p. 2; see Sacrifice Zone). The Bhopal catastrophe was considered by Amnesty International (2024) to be a clear example of environmental racism, a concept directly associated with slow violence that highlights how ethnic minorities are much more exposed to environmental pollution than majorities worldwide (see Ecosocial Justice).

It is also relevant, to exemplify this phenomenon, to rescue the old axiom of Eduardo Galeano (1971): “Mankind’s *(and womankind’s) poverty as a consequence of the wealth of the land”. I have added the italicised text in brackets, as slow violence is often associated with extractivist processes (see Extractivism) that dispossess native populations, subjecting them to regular violence and terrible ecological consequences that are especially detrimental to women. A paradigmatic example is the extractivist processes in Peru, which involve mining projects with a huge environmental impact that notably affect the health of farming women and children who remain in the territory while men go to work in mining or oil operations. These operations pollute drinking water and soil, generating illnesses in children that traditional remedies cannot alleviate, and significantly affect the survival of the native population. Women are responsible for caring for children and elderly people, as well as working in the fields, and they are who mostly must deal with these situations (Silva, 2017). Furthermore, these mining operations, like many other environmental crimes, create an environment conducive to violence against women, including the sexual exploitation of women and children to provide sexual services to miners (IUCN, 2020) (see Ecofeminism). Finally, many of these dispossession processes in Peru and other parts of the world result in the forced relocation of populations to cities, ultimately materialising what Svampa (2008) calls an ’emptiable area’ (see Forced Environmental Displacement).

As Nixon (2011, pp. 3, 8) states, slow violence poses several challenges: scientific, legal, political, and representational or communicative. Ecological humanities have proven to be highly effective in addressing the latter, as they can illustrate slow development processes or processes that are difficult to grasp due to the temporal scale of human life through representations (see Ecological art history). Furthermore, this concept has been very productive for ecocriticism and ecological humanities as a tool for analysing processes that develop over a temporal scale extending from an indefinite past, present and future, causing ecological damage that future generations will suffer. An example of this can be seen in the work of Schneider-Mayerson, who claims that climate fiction is an effective means of representing and communicating the slow violence of climate change.

Bibliography:

Amnesty International (2 de diciembre de 2024). India: Environmental Racism Enabled Forty Years of Injustice for Survivors of Bhopal Gas Tragedy. https://www.amnestyusa.org/press-releases/india-environmental-racism-enabled-forty-years-of-injustice-for-survivors-of-bhopal-gas-tragedy/

Arias Rubio, G. (10 de marzo de 2020). Mujeres y clima: los tantos porqués del ecofeminismo.https://www.elsaltodiario.com/el-rumor-de-las-multitudes/mujeres-y-clima-los-tantos-porques-del-ecofeminismo

Bansal, T. (2026). Bhopal Gas Tragedy: The Disaster Lives on in the Women of Bhopal 41 Years Later. https://behanbox.com/2025/12/02/bhopal-gas-tragedy-the-disaster-lives-on-in-the-women-of-bhopal-41-years-later/

Comisión para la Justicia Racial de la Iglesia Unida de Cristo (1987) Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States. https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1310/ML13109A339.pdf

Galeano, E. H. (1971). Las venas abiertas de América Latina. Siglo XXI.

IUCN (septiembre de 2020). Gender-Based Violence and the Environment. Disponible en: https://iucn.org/resources/issues-brief/gender-based-violence-and-environment

Nixon, R. (2011). Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press.

Schneider-Mayerson, M. (2019). Whose odds? The absence of climate justice in American climate fiction novels. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 26(4), 944-967.

Silva, R. (2017). Mujeres y conflictos ecoterritoriales. Impactos, estrategias, resistencias. Lima, Perú. Disponible en: https://www.demus.org.pe/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Mujeresyconflictos_Convenio.-2017.pdf Svampa, M. (2008). La disputa por el desarrollo: territorio, movimientos de carácter socio-ambiental y discursos dominantes. En: M. Svampa. Cambio de época. Movimientos sociales y poder político (pp. 1-31).