The grammar of global violence

M Nadarajah

We live in a world that constantly champions human rights, progress and civilisation, yet remains caught in cycles of war, genocide, ecological collapse and the systematic humiliation of the powerless.

This contradiction is not caused by a few rogue actors, isolated states or random historical accidents. It requires something unseen and deeper: an honest confrontation with the possibility that the very framework by which we have been taught to think, know, act and govern is itself generating violence –not by chance, but structurally.

The observations and insights presented here are not about merely assigning blame. They do not accuse every Western thinker, institution or people – nor do they imply that violence and domination are exclusive to Western societies. History shows no civilisation with completely clean hands.

What they reveal are recurring structural patterns embedded in a “dominant stream” of Western intellectual, emotional and institutional cultures that extend worldwide through direct, indirect and neo-colonial influences. These patterns have shaped the modern world’s global infrastructure more than any other single tradition. They did not just fail to prevent violence but actively created the conditions for it.

While this essay is critical of the West, keep in mind that, within that same tradition, courageous dissenters – Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Erich Fromm, Paulo Freire, Jürgen Habermas and many others – have challenged these patterns from the inside. Their voices are part of this story, too.

The hegemonic patterns, taken together, form an interlocking ecosystem: a self-reinforcing web of ideas, emotions and institutions that produces suffering with remarkable consistency across time, geography and generation.

The universalisation of the particular

Every culture produces values it holds dear. The crisis begins when one culture proclaims its particular values as universal truths applicable to all humanity, for all time, without invitation or consent.

This is precisely what a dominant current of Western intellectual culture accomplished over several centuries, particularly in the colonial era. Its own historically situated norms – rationality defined in narrowly cerebral, text-bound terms, individual rights, private property and linear progress – were elevated to the status of timeless universals.

Under banners like “natural law” or “human rights,” a worldview generated by a small, powerful faction of humanity was projected globally, while indigenous, communal and relational ethical traditions were simultaneously dismissed as primitive, pre-rational or irrational, or mere folklore.

What was lost in this process cannot be overstated. Across Africa, Asia and Latin America, entire civilisational ways and forms of life – rooted in reciprocity, ecological belonging, intergenerational responsibility and communal wisdom — were not simply overlooked. They were actively delegitimised, rendered invisible or demonised, often enforced at the point of a sword or a law.

The deep irony is that many of these traditions contained precisely the wisdom that is now most urgently needed: how to live within ecological limits, resolve conflict without domination and through reconciliation, and sustain community over fragmentation and isolation.

That vast, pluriversal (“many-worlded”) field was fenced off – and the fencing was called modern civilisation.

This universalising impulse is not without internal critics. The Enlightenment tradition also produced thinkers who questioned its own exclusions. This is a tension that remains alive today wherever people fight for rights that were never originally intended for them.

The violence of a single story

The universalisation of Western values did not operate through force alone.

It required – and produced – a parallel monopoly over knowledge itself. Western intellectual culture institutionalised a single authorised form of thinking and knowing: empirical, text-mediated and logical: the knowledge of laboratories and peer-reviewed publications.

All other modes of thinking and knowing – oral traditions, ecological, cosmological, embodied wisdom, spiritual encounters, relational ways of being, ancestral memory – were systematically declared unscientific and therefore irrelevant.

This epistemic monopoly is itself a form of violence – symbolic as well as institutional. When your way of knowing is declared non-knowledge, your very humanity is diminished – typically beginning with the destruction of your language, your cosmology and your culture.

Back in 2009, the celebrated Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warned us, in a powerfully moving TED Talk presentation, about “the danger of a single story.”

Schools, universities, hospitals and courts became the primary instruments of this epistemic narrowing. They trained generations to distrust their cultural knowledge and defer instead to certified expertise legitimised by hegemonic standards, directly or indirectly connected to Western institutions.

Communities once capable of self-governance, healing, ecological care and stewardship became dependent on distant systems they could neither understand nor question. This was not development – it was manufactured dependency.

It is worth noting, with painful clarity, that many formerly colonised nations now enthusiastically inflict this same epistemic violence upon their own peoples – the centre and the margin – In their race to “develop”, replicating the very logic that once oppressed them.

Ethical double standards

If epistemic monism silenced alternative knowledge, the dominant tradition’s ethical double standards legitimised exploitation. The gap between proclaimed universal principles and their actual application is perhaps the most structurally significant feature of this story.

The same Enlightenment period – a 17^th and 18th-Century movement in Europe – that produced magnificent proclamations of “dignity”, “duty” and “freedom” simultaneously oversaw the transatlantic slave trade, colonial genocides and the systematic, devastating extraction of raw materials and labour from entire continents.

This was not accidental hypocrisy but structural logic. The moral community envisaged by Enlightenment ideals was always implicitly bounded: rights for “us”, extraction from “them”; liberty at home, coercion abroad.

The eminent German philosopher of the Enlightenment period, Immanuel Kant, spoke eloquently of universal dignity while defending racial hierarchies.

John Locke, an English philosopher and physician, theorised natural rights in an earlier period while holding shares in the slave trade.

Their philosophical apparatus did not contradict their brutality. Instead, it cloaked it in the language of universality and probably in very opaque terms.

Setting in motion a counter-narrative in the early 20th century, the Italian critical social philosopher and political leader Gramsci identified the socio-cultural-political mechanism as “hegemony” – the capacity of ruling groups to present their particular interests as the common good, including the remarkable achievement of convincing the oppressed to consent to the terms of their own domination.

What makes this pattern so durable is not force alone, but this cultural and moral camouflage: the ability to inflict structural harm while appearing to embody civilisational virtue.

We continue to live and suffer inside this structure even today. It is most clear today in the field of geopolitics.

One arrow, one destination

Underpinning both the epistemic monopoly and the ethical double standards is a deeper philosophical assumption: that history progresses linearly, always upward and forward, culminating in the Western “modern” ideal.

Though there are many ways to understand “modernity”, in its popular hegemonic sense, it is a “Western” project.

This view positions all peoples and cultures at different stages of the same inevitable unilinear historical journey – with Europe and the United States at the apex and the rest perpetually trying to catch up.

Colonial conquest was reframed through this lens as “civilising mission and development assistance”. Resistance to it was pathologised as backwardness to be eradicated. The violence of Empire was narrated as the necessary cost of progress – regrettable, perhaps, but ultimately justified by the destination.

This logic did not die with the dismantling of formal colonialism and the independence movements in Asia, Africa and Latin America. It continues to govern global development through neo-colonial discourse, structures and pathways: in structural adjustment programmes that forced the dismantling of public institutions, in the “modernisation” of traditional agriculture through toxic industrial chemicals, and in financial conditionalities that strip nations of economic sovereignty.

This totalising power of Western narrative was identified and named. In 1978, the Palestinian-American public intellectual Edward Said released his seminal work, Orientalism, a foundational text of post-colonial studies and movement.

The seminal work showed the narrative power that made the West – the “occident” (“western world”) – superior and the East – the “orient” – inferior, directly and indirectly legitimising Western violence in the name of progress.

Yet even this narrative has been contested from within. Liberation theologians, post-colonial thinkers, radical economists and ecological thinkers in Europe and North America have persistently challenged the myth of unilinear progress. Their dissent reminds us that the dominant story was and will never be the only story.

Abstraction of the human and the loss of nature

The more abstract the proclamations about “Man,” the more disposable actual human beings became. This is not a paradox but a pattern.

Grand discourse on Rights, Reason and Progress elevated humanity to near-divine status in theory while reducing real people, particularly those at the margins of Empire, to objects, savages, data points, case studies or collateral damage.

The same civilisation that produced the “Declaration of the Rights of Man” produced the Bengal famine, the rubber terror of the Belgian Ling Leopold’s Congo, and the systematic destruction of Indigenous populations across three continents. These were not failures of the system but products of it.

That destruction continues till today. Some “Humans” are more “human” than the rest, who are deemed “subhuman”.

This orientation also extended seamlessly to the natural world. The insight is more urgent today than ever.

Born in the French colony Martinique in the Caribbean, Frantz Fanon, a highly influential psychiatrist and philosopher, observed that the same dehumanising colonial logic used against colonised peoples was also used against the land itself. Both were reduced to instruments of violent accumulation.

Thus, forests, rivers, soils, oceans and species were stripped of intrinsic worth and reclassified as “resources” and “natural capital”.

The planetary ecological crisis we now face is not a technical failure. It is the direct consequence – argued at length by ecological historians, environmental philosophers and post-colonial scholars – of a foundational philosophical error: the belief that the world exists “for” us rather than “with” us.

Nature rights, not just human rights, are the frontier thought-emotion this moment demands.

Read the sequel: Why good people look away from global violence

M Nadarajah holds a doctorate in sociology and is an Asian Public Intellectual fellow. He is an associate director at Sejahtera Leadership Initiative, Malaysia, and works at the intersection of transformative learning, dialogical democracy and eco-social regeneration.

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