British Invasion of the Body Snatchers: Globalization, Agency, and Structural Violence

Our world gets smaller every day. The effects of globalization are now felt on every continent and in every country. Many of these effects are predictable: creolization of cultures, greater availability of information and technology, and increased transnational economic trade. Others effects are not so predictable, or at best they are unintended. What are the total effects of an economic development project in Port-au-Prince, the ramifications of US economic policy towards Brazil, or the total distributed utility of a nation's decision to cut education programs in an attempt to attract creditor nations?

These programs and initiatives have consequences that seem far removed from the accounting of GDP. They marginalize poor individuals, driving them to even deeper economic deprivation and limiting their ability to make choices, their agency. This phenomenon is structural violence. Different from interpersonal violence, which stems from disputes between individuals, the machinations of structural violence pervade every level of society- they are the systemic, "modal" circumstances that directly or indirectly force violence upon those least able to recuperate- the poor (Farmer 40).

An analysis of structural violence, according to anthropologist and doctor Paul Farmer, involves a summation of three factors: geographical breadth, historical depth, and the intersection of "various social axes" (43). Geographical breadth deals with the interconnectedness of privileged people at one end of the world with people less privileged on the other. Historical depth examines the political and economic facts that form narratives of the afflicted parties and their forebears (42). Finally, structural violence is closely tied to the intersection of gender, race, and oppression- three social axes that look at the cultural aspects of systemic brutality (46).

Farmer would argue, though, that this definition insufficiently describes the effects of structural violence. Only through firsthand experience and to a lesser extent secondhand witnessing can an observer truly feel the texture of cruelty. Only through "compassion and solidarity" is this empathy and understanding possible (27). As a result, both Farmer and Nancy Scheper-Hughes include personal accounts of structural violence, not only as pedagogical tools, but also to provide qualitative, experiential accounts of injustice.

The first person for whom Farmer bears witness is Acẻphie Joseph. Beginning geographically, a Washington-drafted municipal project to build a reservoir for Haiti's capital city, Port-au-Prince, necessitated the flooding of a river valley in the nearby village of Kay. Historically, the river valley was home to many farming families, able to sustain themselves by farming the riparian zones on the river's banks. Flooding forced them to higher, less fertile ground, driving many farming families into poverty, including the Josephs (32). Socially, their daughter Acẻphie was forced to leave school and support her impoverished family at the age of 19, leading her past a military barracks on the way to market. Constricted by the expectations and limited opportunities of her gender, she flirted with the comparatively rich soldiers in hopes of marrying one and removing herself as a burden from her family. After a brief affair with, Acẻphie contracted AIDS, a disease geographically broad in and of itself. In the end, she died of complications of the disease, but only after having passed it on to her daughter from another liaison.

Acẻphie Joseph was the victim of structural violence. Entities unknown to her and at a far geographical remove flooded her ancestral homeland in the name of development, forcing her family into poverty. Economics limited her choices by forcing her to leave school, and her social role as a female limited her choices even further, leaving few options but "unfavorable unions" (39). This limitation of choices, of agency, ultimately drove Acẻphie to an early grave, and she is but one of the thousands of water refugees whose options have been curtailed by decisions of the political elite.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes tells a similar tale, this time of a dentist working in a public clinic in Brazil under the Cardoso administration. Historically, the nation was recuperating from its 1992-93 economic crisis and Cardoso's party, the FHC adopted neoliberal economic policies in an attempt to curb inflation and win foreign financial aid. At the time and up to this day, both the IMF and the World Bank, located in Washington DC, have been following the same neoliberal principals and have turned this 'Washington Consensus' into a set of prerequisites for loans. Among these policies are restrictions on social programs, including education, unemployment security, and medical care.

As medical care includes dentistry, funding cuts have reduced the local dentist to operating an ill-equipped office. "Just a chair" he complains, "all [he] does is pull teeth" from people who simply need a filling (Scheper-Hughes 6). Care is not the same across economic boundaries, however. The poor "must make-do with Third World Medicine" while "the middle classes and the wealthy... indulge themselves in the very latest... forms of clinical medicine" (ibid).

No isolated incident, the poor throughout Brazil have significantly reduced agencies when it comes to healthcare and many other necessities of life. Indeed, this deprivation of agency bespeaks a much greater deprivation that turns individuals from active agents into passive "little people" who "can have anything done to them" (5, emph. mine). Both Scheper-Hughes and Farmer end their pieces with indictments of the suffering caused by political elites and powerful economic entities. Both speak of structural violence in terms of its affront to human rights, not only via its imposed suffering, but also on its imposed choice limitation. Farmer goes so far as to suggest, drawing on liberation theology, preferential treatment for the poor (Farmer 138).

Appeals to social justice and ideological claims of that ilk may persuade many, but the conclusions of Scheper-Hughes and Farmer do not move the World Bank, the IMF, and other neoliberal economic entities. These institutions and governments have a "narrower [view] of development" (Sen 5). How, then, can the imperative of social justice translate into sound economic planning advice? Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen provides a good structural framework in his book Development as Freedom. Sen agrees with the findings of Farmer and Scheper-Hughes. He writes that "development requires the removal of major sources of unfreedom: ... poor economic opportunities as well as systematic social deprivation" (3). This argument is not, however, frames through an ideological perspective, but instead through an economic one. Recalling the socially-conscious yet strictly economical writings of Adam Smith, Sen writes that "greater freedom enhances the ability of people to help themselves and also to influence the world, and these matters are central to the process of development" (18).

Sen dodges criticism by the proponents of the Washington Consensus that he lacks substantial numbers, offering his own criticism that the conventional indicator of wealth and development, GDP per capita, does not accurately reflect the reality of development (30). It's not reflective of distribution. As such, the true aspects of freedom "require us to go well beyond the traditional view of development in terms of 'the growth of output per head'" (291). Instead, Sen writes, we must give value to increased freedom through education and access to medical care, as both of these services provide for increased agency and better market efficiency through a better-informed public and a more productive and less indigent workforce.

To conclude, not only is the promotion of freedom through the development of positive social rights a way to advance the social justice-oriented cause of human rights in general, but it is also possible to justify these actions in terms to which economists are receptive. Increased agency equates to increased rights, no matter what perspective through which it is viewed. As our world gets smaller, the effects of our agency will become clearer and more consequent for us.

Works Cited

Farmer, Paul. Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. "The Theft of Life: The Globalization of Organ Stealing Rumours." Anthropology Today 12:3 (1996), 3-11. (JSTOR)

Sen, Amartya. Development as Freedom. Knopf Publishing, 2000.