The war without bullets: Socio-sructural violence from a critical standpoint

For over a quarter of a century David and Cathy have worked in separate, parallel but mutually supportive and stimulating ways, as community psychologist and community activist respectively, to collaboratively understand and contest socio-structural violence. Each has focused in different but critically complementary ways on interconnections between poverty, inequality, unemployment and psycho-social destruction. As a community activist, drawing on her experience of popular education and radical politics, Cathy characterised what was constituted by these interconnections as manifestations of 'Wars Without Bullets' waged remorselessly against structurally oppressed people, and to promote conscientization through popular education, theatre of the oppressed, film making, radical politics and accessible writing. As a community psychologist, drawing upon critical scholarship and radical praxis, David tried to develop the notion of a 'War Without Bullets' in ways which would give it legitimacy within the rhetorical discursive practices of the establishment yet critically refuse individualism, psychologism and essentialism. Both sought to deploy the notion of the 'War Without Bullets' for progressive change. In this presentation, the discursive frame of reference of the 'War Without Bullets' will be explicated, developed and critiqued. In doing so some advantages of long term collaboration between community activism and community psychology for effective thinking and action will be explored and debated.