What are the social structures that make violence possible?

Violence is not evenly distributed. Studies have shown that communities riddled with violence are poorer and hold a social stigma that portrays them as naturally violent and incorrigible.
Researchers have tried to understand how violence affects marginalized communities by looking at different forms of violence, such as urban and gender violence, as isolated phenomena and doing case studies of criminalized communities or men without sufficient analysis of the context that makes violence possible. My research contributes to this literature in two ways. First, it problematizes the compartmentalized study of violence, which characterizes women’s experiences of violence as domestic while ignoring how urban and state violence affect them. Second, my research moves beyond traditional case studies of urban violence in specific neighbourhoods to connect the dynamics of violence at the local level to state actors’ political decisions.