Enduring social inequalities in settler colonial societies are not an accident. They are produced and maintained by the self-repairing structural features and dynastic character of systemic racism and its intersecting oppressions. Using methods from diverse anticolonial liberation movements and systems theory, Structural Violence theorizes the existence of adaptive and self-replicating historical formations that underwrite cultures of violence in settler colonial societies. Corresponding epistemic forces tied to profit and wealth accumulation for beneficiary groups often go untracked. The account offered here argues that these epistemic forces play a central role in producing and maintaining massive health inequalities and the maldistribution of disease burdens-including those associated with sexual violence-for marginalized populations. It upends the widespread view that structural racism can be dismantled without addressing gendered violence. It also advocates for a theory of change rooted in reparative action and models of structural competency that respond to the built-in design of structural violence and the ecosystems of impunity that allow it to thrive.

About the Author
Elena Ruiz is Director and Associate Professor of The Research Institute for Structural Change (RISC) at Michigan State University. She is a survivor advocate and served as the Principal Researcher on Gender-Based violence for MeToo International, the organization behind the #metoo movement. Her writings on structural justice and system change have focused on race, gender, ethnicity, and colonial occupation in the Americas.

Reviews
Structural Violence is a brilliant, urgent book. Social epistemology has long struggled to provide a satisfactory account of the relation between the epistemic and material (historic, economic, political) features of oppression, privileging one over the other. This is the book that we have been waiting for. Ruiz gives a decisive account of how settler epistemologies uphold structural violence in the long duree. Full of vitality, originality, and political power, the book itself changes the terms of writing about the nature of systemic oppression. A must read! * Rocio Zambrana, University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras *
This analogy is captivating,...Recommended. All readers. * Choice *



Book Information
ISBN 9780197634035
Author Elena Ruiz
Format Paperback
Page Count 472
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 658g
Dimensions(mm) 163mm * 226mm * 46mm