Reconceptualizing Violence in International and Comparative Education: Revisiting Galtung’s Framework

Outside of a specialist literature, the study of violence occupies a marginal position within comparative and international education scholarship. A key contributing factor is the absence of a holistic conceptual framework that can capture the nature, extent and causes of violence in education. The article proposes such a framework, by updating Johan Galtung’s model of direct, structural and cultural violence and putting it into dialogue with more recent theoretical work from the social sciences and humanities. This dialogue affirms the importance of each form of violence and the interconnections between them but proposes a deeper appreciation of the depth ontology of violence and a reappraisal of Galtung’s ideas about the visibility and invisibilization of violence. The article explores the utility of the framework by using it to explore the so-called learning crisis, which it argues may be more accurately considered a crisis of violence.