What is Slow Violence?

Displacement

Visibility

Slow violence has as much to do with rethinking space as time (13)

By holding the cabinet meeting underwater, the Prime Minister makes the future of the Maldives visible and 'photogenic'.

Vietnam

Rethinking displacement

Displacement usually refers to people moving to different land, in the Maldives 'the place itself disappears from beneath the people' (14)

Since the war ‘The U. S. Institute of Medicine committee has linked seventeen medical conditions to Agent Orange.’ Another committee have suggested that it ‘increases the likelihood of developing Parkinson’s disease and heart disease.’ (Nixon 2)

Creating Drama

'In an attempt to dramatise this world, the Maldivian Prime Minister, Mohamed Nasheed, held an underwater cabinet meeting' (14)

The Maldives

Time

War

Depleted-Uranium

The cabinet meeting has a sense of urgency because it is happening now. 'This scene serves as a preview of the aftermath' (14)

'We are witnessing the prospect of an entire nation vanishing underwater.' (13)

While the immediate casualties of an exploded bomb are counted, Nixon points out other casualties that are staggered over the years: those who ingest the depleted uranium, those caught by bombs that did not explode during the war that metastasize into landmines, chemical residues that filter into land and rivers, genetic deterioration that leads to malformed infants. ‘They may suffer slow, invisible deaths that don’t fit the news cycle at CNN or Fox, but they are war casualties nonetheless.’ (4)

Casualties of war are only counted during the time period that the war takes place. This means that any consequential casualties of war are not acknowledged.

'Reverse Swamping'

Where the news tends to focus on rich white countries being 'swamped' with immigrants, this image shows 'poor brown people facing the threat of having their national space drowned' (15)

Maathia

What is Slow Violence?

‘losing topsoil should be considered analogous to losing territory to an invading enemy… Unfortunately, the loss of soil through these elements had yet to be perceived with such urgency.’ (qtd. Nixon, 5)

‘Think of the following examples of what I call slow violence: climate change; the thawing polar icecaps; the slow toxic drift of agricultural nitrates from the heartland down the Mississippi to the Gulf’s deep delta, creating a vast dead zone larger than New Jersey; think of oil spills or deforestation; acidifying oceans and host of other slow-unfolding environmental disasters: theses slow-motion catastrophes confront us with formidable representational challenges that can hinder our efforts to create narratives and images around which to mobilise.’ (2)

Climate Change

'A major challenge facing us as environmentalists is how to create stories, images and symbols that can capture the slow-motion catastrophe of delayed effects.

In order to make slow-violence understandable in an age where everything moves so fast, we need to redefine speed: 'we see such efforts in talk of accelerated species loss, rapid climate change, and in attempts to recast "glacial" - once a dead metaphor for slow-moving - as a rousing image of unacceptably fast loss.' (10)

Fast

'Fast is faster than it used to be and story units have become concomitantly shorter' (10)

Media Coverage

'Ours is an age of onrushing turbo-capitalism, where the present feels more abbreviated than it used to' (9)

Narrative

Because the workings of slow violence lack the immediacy of the fast and spectacular, we are less apt to feel concerned about it. Without a narrative, slow violence is easy to ignore.

Invisibility

We are biased 'toward spectacular. instantaneous violence'. Nixon points out that the people most affected by slow violence are 'the impoverished populations of the global South'. 'The invisibility of their poverty is compounded by the invisibility of the slow violence that permeates so many of their lives.' (10)

Nixon: slow violence