Highlights
- The article argues that addressing contemporary violence requires rethinking how violence is conceptualised, particularly when dominant approaches obscure structural and colonial forms of harm.
- It develops a critical-relational understanding of violence that connects different forms, sites and temporalities of harm, rather than treating contemporary crises as isolated events.
- The article calls for understanding violence from the margins and questioning whose knowledge shapes dominant understandings of violence, highlighting how colonial ways of thinking can perpetuate harm and reproduce violence.
Abstract
Starting from the idea that we currently live in a time of monsters, and drawing on a range of critical perspectives, this theory note argues that addressing contemporary violence requires first rethinking how violence is conceptualised. It challenges dominant framings of violence that obscure structural and colonial violence or present the current moment as decontextualised from longer histories of harm. To address this, it makes a case for knowing violence from the margins and for attending to the politics of naming violence – asking whose knowledge has shaped dominant understandings and with what consequences. Drawing particularly on feminist, postcolonial, decolonial, and relational scholarship, it conceptualises violence as existing along a continuum across diverse forms, sites and temporalities, while foregrounding the consequences of structural violence that are routinely obscured yet underpin many contemporary crises. In centring a critical-relational understanding of violence, the note proposes that violence must be analysed as relational and co-constituted across contexts. This perspective challenges colonial approaches that obscure structural violence and thereby enable its reproduction – perpetuating cycles of harm and sowing the seeds for future times of monsters.
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Third World Quarterly, September 2026
https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2026.2734477