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Global Health Justice

Category: Structural Violence

Structural violence refers to systematic and normalized social, economic, and political oppression of vulnerable populations. Structural violence includes income inequality, racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, sexism, ableism, and other means of social exclusion leading to stress, poverty, trauma, crime, incarceration, lack of access to care, healthy food, and physical activity.

Those in power typically benefit from structural violence. As a rule, they will cling to their power at all costs, including through physical violence to preserve or enact systemic changes that reinforce power divides. We live within systems that are expressly designed to reinforce social disparities.

U.N. Faces Record Humanitarian Aid Shortfall — but Not for Ukrainians

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Important article about a just published UN report that describes the structurally racist responses to global humanitarian crises. Farnaz Fassihi reminds us that as war, global heating/drought, COVID-19, and longstanding structural violence have grossly increased the need for global humanitarian assistance, the responses from the US, Europe, and Japan has focused on Ukraine at the expense of non-white countries of the Global South. Rich countries have exceeded the requests for Ukrainian needs but raised less than a third of the…

Election of activist presidential team to combat structural violence in Colombia

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Colombia just elected Gustavo Petro as the country’s first leftist president and environmental activist Francia Márquez Mina as the country’s first Black vice president. They have promised social and environmental justice and peace. Their proposed platform includes universal health care, public education and banking, and rejecting proposals to expand fracking and mining in favor of investing in clean energy, and land reform. And they want the 4,000 richest Colombians – and richest companies – to pay taxes as the rest…

Treatment of Palestinians by Israel called “Apartheid” by Amnesty International

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Amnesty International released their report: “Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians: a Cruel System of Domination and a Crime Against Humanity” They now join other respected Israeli and international human rights organizations in naming Israel as an Apartheid State.  The report describes Israel’s system of oppression and domination against the Palestinian people, including seizures of Palestinian land and property, unlawful killings, forcible transfer, drastic movement restrictions, the denial of nationality and citizenship to Palestinians, and the passing of the “nation state” law…