Blood in the Paperwork: The Quiet Machinery of Political Violence
Due to recent events and the endless carousel of headlines, I’ve been hearing this sentence over and over again: “There’s no place in our political discourse for violence.” It appears in speeches, in op-eds, in the carefully curated tweets of journalists who speak as if words alone could shield the world from harm. There’s a solemnity to it, a cadence that makes it sound like truth itself, or a reassurance in a time that feels frightening and unstable. But every time I hear it, I feel conflicted. It doesn’t ring quite true. I think that politics has always been entangled with harm, whether we notice it or not, whether we call it that or call it something else entirely.
Violence has always had a place in politics.
Violence is politics.
Politics is violence.
I think about the headlines themselves: a protest spiralling out of control, a figure assassinated, a moment of chaos frozen into a photograph. People recoil and clutch the words like a talisman. And yet, while everyone stares at the visible violence, the quiet and insidious forms of harm continue unnoticed. Decisions made behind closed doors, in offices and legislative chambers, are reshaping lives and taking a toll on bodies and futures. There’s a family in a refugee camp, a woman walking alone to a clinic she cannot enter, a worker scraping by without health coverage — these are the invisible threads of politics weaving violence into everyday life.
I do understand that the phrase could be comforting, and allows us to feel morally upright without looking too closely at what power does when we aren’t watching. It sanitises the mess of governance, frames violence as a deviation rather than a constant companion. However, comfort is a poor guide for understanding.
Now, I am not glorifying violence. I morally do not wish harm upon anyone. I find violence ugly and corrosive for those who wield it as much as those who suffer from it. But when we pretend that politics can ever be clean of it, when we imagine that our parliamentary debates and campaign rallies somehow float above the blood, that’s when the lie becomes dangerous. Because to live in a society is to live under the shadow of violence, whether we see it or not. People hear the word “violence” and immediately picture something perhaps more cinematic. And yes, those moments are violent, spectacularly so, but there’s also the silent violence that is written into law, budget sheets, or silent decisions taken in sterile rooms. I also understand that intensity of harm differs — physical assault, systemic deprivation, and bureaucratic neglect each affect lives differently — yet each wields power with real-world consequences, reminding us that politics and violence are inseparable, even when the forms differ.
When a government cuts access to healthcare and people die of treatable illnesses, that’s violence. When women’s reproductive rights are stripped away, when ICE raids tear apart families in the middle of the night, when bombs are funded and dropped on strangers abroad — tell me, what are those if not acts of political violence?
Politics is not diplomacy.
Politics is the argument about who gets what, who is protected, and who is left to suffer.
And behind that argument is always, inevitably, force.
Diplomacy is the dream of politics without violence; politics is the reality of violence dressed up in paperwork and euphemism.
Of course, no one wants to admit this, because it’s easier to point at a protestor or radical throwing a rock and say “violence has no place in politics” than it is to admit that your own government quietly enacts policies that leave thousands hungry, homeless, or dead.
It’s easier to police the outburst than the system.
I suppose what really grates me is the selective outrage. A politician being punched is a national scandal, but an entire people being starved by blockades is “foreign policy.” A protest turning ugly is “mob violence,” but an austerity budget that shaves years off life expectancy is just “fiscal responsibility.” We pretend violence is an aberration when, in truth, it’s the scaffolding holding the whole thing up.
And yet, when it comes to violence, the world rarely reacts to what actually shapes people’s lives.
Children in Gaza wake to the sound of bombs, but also to a less visible violence: the absence of medicine, the shuttered schools, the markets stripped of work and livelihood. Their mornings are measured by scarcity, their small bodies learning early that survival is a negotiation with forces far beyond their control. Every decision is political — when to leave the house, how to carry water, which streets feel safe enough to cross, where to evacuate to since their homes are brutally stripped from them and their homeland itself is war-torn. These are not lessons in safety or planning; they are lessons in endurance, in navigating a world designed to limit them, to contain their futures. I think of a boy measuring the last drops of milk, a girl balancing her schoolbooks against the weight of hunger and fear. These small, intimate acts of survival are themselves acts of politics.
The harm extends beyond immediate danger. Children grow up with trauma that seeps into play, into study, into the tentative architecture of imagination. Dreams are shortened, ambitions narrowed, as the infrastructure of daily life — clinics, schools, community spaces — is deliberately fractured. The planes delivering aid arrive in small gestures, symbolic and fleeting, dwarfed by the unbroken continuity of blockades, drones, and military hardware. And yet, governments around the world speak of human rights with moral certainty, funding the very machinery that renders life unliveable while maintaining the comfort of distance. For those who live comfortably thousands of miles away, a single protestor’s act in London or New York or Sydney is “shocking” and a moment worthy of outrage, while the quiet daily suffering of children and families elsewhere goes unseen, unremarked, unfelt.
Wars fought across oceans are violence lived intimately, even from afar. War is violence. Funding war or genocide is violence. Every bomb funded, every drone strike authorised, every political decision that sanctions destruction abroad ripples through families, villages, and generations. Homes are destroyed, water poisoned, schools flattened. Parents lose children, children lose parents, entire communities are reshaped by grief, fear, and displacement. Yet in the offices and halls of power, the authors of these policies continue their lives, shielded by bureaucracy, protocol, and the comforting abstraction of statistics. Human suffering becomes a number on a balance sheet, a talking point in a debate, a footnote in a press release, while the machinery that created it spins on, untouched and unquestioned.
The moral dissonance is staggering. Compassion is often measured by proximity rather than by magnitude of harm. A violent incident in a city thousands of miles away will provoke headlines, hashtags, commentary, and moral outrage, while the deliberate sustained deprivation of life and opportunity in Gaza or elsewhere barely disturbs the consciousness of those with the power to intervene. Sometimes, I think, this is because the people suffering do not resemble the observers. They are not Brown, Black, or otherwise seen as “like us.” Their lives are made abstract by distance and difference, their suffering rendered inconveniently invisible. Yet the moment someone who looks, talks, or lives like the observers is threatened, the outrage is instantaneous, the hashtags flood in, the moral clarity is declared. The shaping of lives through decisions, funding, and political cover, producing harm that is invisible to those who benefit from distance and privilege is structural violence writ large.
I have to admit, I’ve grown quite desensitised in ways that gravely unsettle me and I find disturbing. Endless scrolling through headlines, images of bombed cities, refugee crises, raids, and austerity-driven suffering starts to blur into a constant, numbing background. The sheer scale of harm, repeated day after day, begins to feel almost routine. Tragedy becomes data, lives become statistics, and the visceral reality of suffering feels distant even when I pause to imagine it. That desensitisation is itself a reflection of how systemic violence operates: it is so pervasive, so relentless, that even awareness can lose its edge. And if someone like me — someone paying attention, reading, thinking, trying to understand — can become numb, what hope is there that the casual observer, the privileged, the comfortable, will ever truly reckon with the weight of political harm?
In the United States, some families live under a different kind of terror. ICE officers come at night, and parents are pulled from their beds while children cling to sheets that still smell faintly of fear. Every door slammed, every suitcase hastily packed, every hurried phone call to a relative becomes a moment of violence. The law may frame it as enforcement, but the human cost is immediate and lasting. Anxiety lingers long after the agents have left, trust between children and the adults who are supposed to protect them fractures, and a family’s sense of safety is permanently reshaped. Nights are sleepless, days are haunted, and every simple act — eating, bathing, walking to school — becomes a negotiation with fear.
For those taken to detention centres, the violence continues in bureaucratic form. Thousands of people who speak little or no English are forced to sign documents they cannot read or understand, consenting to their own detention or deportation without the ability to question it. Language becomes a barrier to justice and safety, and the system exploits that vulnerability. Each signature, each procedure, each rote question becomes another layer of harm, another act in a long series of violences that are invisible to the casual observer. Lives are reduced to paperwork, bodies become numbers, and autonomy is stripped under the guise of procedure.
The broader society debates legality, procedure, or whether outrage is “justified,” but the human suffering rarely enters the conversation. The anxiety in a child’s eyes, the quiet terror of a parent trying to navigate a foreign system, the way an entire community braces for the next raid — these realities are invisible, inconvenient, and difficult to quantify. The spectacle of a protest or a viral video draws attention, while the systemic, intimate, persistent harm of enforced separation and bureaucratic coercion remains unremarked and unaddressed.
Taking away women’s reproductive rights is also violence. It seeps into the daily lives of those affected, shaping choices in ways no law should ever touch. The decisions of whether to walk down a certain street alone, whether to speak up at work, whether to carry a pregnancy knowing the consequences might stretch beyond the body into education, livelihood, and dreams become fraught. The violence is most stark when women are denied abortion even after being raped or assaulted, forced to carry trauma in their bodies while society dictates their suffering must continue in silence. It is a violence that does not simply touch flesh; it reaches into autonomy, into the capacity to imagine a future that belongs fully to oneself, to claim one’s own life. Somewhere in the world right now, a young woman is checking her reflection in the morning mirror, weighing a life imposed upon her against the life she envisioned.
It is the kind of harm that lingers long after the headlines have moved on, settling into daily existence in ways that are almost imperceptible to outsiders or the men that shape these legislations for women. It reshapes families, alters relationships, and narrows possibilities. A young woman forced to remain pregnant might abandon ambitions she had nurtured for years, adjust her work and education around an imposed reality, or live with a grief and anger that feels both personal and unjustly public. Even those who have survived assault find themselves caught in another violation: a system that treats their trauma as secondary, their autonomy as negotiable. This is violence measured in the persistent erosion of choice, dignity, and relentless theft of potential.
It is intimate, and it is insidious. It is enacted through legislation, through courts, through policies that pretend morality can be imposed without consequence. And yet, for the women living under it, the consequences are immediate and life-defining. Each day is a negotiation with fear, with anger, with a society that insists their bodies are public property, that their suffering is political theatre, that their pain can be legislated away. This is the kind of violence that statistics fail to capture, the kind that headlines ignore, and the kind that lingers in silence long after the moral outrage of the moment has faded.
On the contrary, denying access to healthcare, rationing medicine, or designing budgets that make survival a privilege rather than a right is violence in its most insidious form. People navigate each day weighed down by uncertainty, calculating every decision through the lens of what care they can afford — or whether they can afford care at all. Denial of health insurance transforms ordinary choices into high-stakes risks. A cough becomes a source of anxiety, a minor injury a potential catastrophe, and routine screenings feel like luxuries rather than safeguards. Preventable illnesses become life-altering, sometimes fatal, and yet the people making these policies sit far away in offices, insulated from the consequences.
The violence lies beyond just in scarcity, but in the moral calculus imposed on the vulnerable: deciding who lives and who dies, who is worth saving and whose suffering is tolerable. Why are some health problems deemed more important than others? Why is access to certain treatments reserved for those who can pay or prove their worthiness? Children born with chronic conditions, adults facing mental health crises, or elderly patients struggling with preventable diseases become casualties of bureaucratic triage. Parents skip medications to buy groceries, young adults avoid appointments they cannot afford, entire communities live with the knowledge that illness might bring financial ruin, or worse. The decisions made in the halls of government transform bodies into instruments of policy, rendering survival contingent on wealth, status, or luck.
This is violence that seeps into homes, minds, and futures. It shapes the rhythm of daily life, imposes fear, anxiety, and quiet despair, and quietly narrows the horizon of possibility. It doesn’t explode onto the evening news, yet it reshapes the very texture of existence for millions, teaching them that the right to live a healthy, dignified life is conditional, negotiable, and ultimately subject to political whim. To decide whose life is more valuable, whose treatment is worthy, is to wield violence on the scale of entire populations, and the moral weight of that choice is almost impossible to measure, but also impossible to ignore.
Every decision made in policy, every line drawn on a budget, every law passed carries consequences that ripple through lives in ways that are intimate, devastating, and unavoidable. All of this exposes the lie at the heart of the familiar phrase “violence has no place in politics.” Politics is about power, and power is inseparable from harm. To wield influence is to make decisions that will protect some and imperil others, to shape lives and deaths with a combination of intent, neglect, and structural design. Pretending otherwise comforts the privileged, spares the powerful from scrutiny, and allows suffering to persist quietly in the shadows, far from the lens of public attention or moral outrage.
The images that seize our attention — the visible wound, the viral video, the protest that turns chaotic — shock us because they are immediate, dramatic, and easy to understand. But they are only symptoms of a much larger, more persistent reality, a reality in which harm is baked into governance, into policy, into the very systems meant to maintain order. Violence is the soil in which politics grows: it feeds on inattention, on moral distance, on the comforting abstraction that allows people to believe that rules, procedures, and rhetoric somehow protect us from harm. Denying its presence is like pretending a garden exists without earth — beautiful in theory, impossible in practice, and deadly for those whose roots cannot find nourishment. To face politics honestly is to recognise the weight of this harm, to confront the human cost embedded in every choice, and to acknowledge that suffering is not an accident, but a product of decisions made, again and again, by those who wield power.
Even within democracies, where we like to imagine the rule of law is a shield against brutality, violence persists in quieter, subtler forms. It lives in the legislation that denies the poor access to legal representation, in the policies that criminalise minor infractions disproportionately in marginalised communities, and in tax systems that punish the sick or disabled far more than the wealthy. These are not accidents or oversights. They are deliberate political decisions, undergirded by force, shaping who survives comfortably and who struggles daily simply to exist. Johan Galtung called this structural violence: power exercised not through fists or bullets, but through the invisible machinery of systems and institutions, through rules that determine which lives are worth protecting and which are deemed expendable.
The human cost is intimate and often invisible. A family unable to afford a lawyer watches a child lose a case that could have protected them. A person with a chronic illness struggles not only with their body, but with bills, bureaucracy, and the constant knowledge that the system is stacked against them. Communities internalise the fear, the precarity, the quiet understanding that society has decided their suffering is acceptable. The violence is not spectacular, but it is persistent, pervasive, and no less real for being bureaucratic. It shapes bodies, futures, and opportunities, reminding us that even in places that call themselves free and fair, politics is never separate from harm.
And it’s not just the Global North that bears witness to this kind of harm. Corruption, bureaucratic neglect, and policy-induced suffering happen everywhere whether in the Philippines or Nepal, in South Sudan or the Congo. The forms may differ, but the effect is the same: lives reshaped, opportunities stolen, trust eroded. Violence does not respect borders; it only respects structures of power. It moves quietly through decisions, budgets, and alliances, through laws that protect some while leaving others exposed, through policies that claim legitimacy while producing suffering.
What makes the familiar platitude so dangerous is not that it is untrue, but that it is comforting to those who already benefit from the system, as it allows them to maintain a sense of moral clarity, a belief that harm is exceptional rather than endemic, while countless lives are quietly destroyed beneath the veneer of civility. Children, families, communities endure suffering not because anyone raised a fist against them in public, but because systems were built to value some lives more than others. It is a violence both banal and profound, structural and intimate, and to ignore it is to accept a world in which injustice becomes invisible by design.
Yet, acknowledging this does not require nihilism or moral surrender. I am not arguing that the spectacular violence we see on the news is good, justified, or morally defensible. What I am saying is that politics and violence are inseparable, and pretending otherwise is a form of willful ignorance, a comforting fiction for those who wish to believe that harm is only ever episodic or accidental. Recognising this, naming structural, bureaucratic, and state-sanctioned violence for what it is, opens the door to honest conversations about morality, responsibility, and power. It forces us to stop pretending we are shocked by fists while ignoring bombs, debt, and deprivation that shape entire lifetimes.
The troubling thing is how selectively we perceive violence. A politician struck at a rally sparks headlines, hashtags, commentary, and moral outrage. Meanwhile, a country starving under blockades, a child dying from preventable illness in a hospital that lacks basic supplies, barely registers as news. A protester throwing a rock is labelled criminal; a government systematically depriving citizens of healthcare, education, or security is treated as routine administration. Austerity programs, draconian immigration policies, and systemic underfunding of public services do not make for gripping television, yet they are violence all the same. They reshape lives, constrain freedom, and instil fear not through spectacle, but through endurance.
Politics, in its essence, is the negotiation of force. To say otherwise is to confuse politics with diplomacy, which is an aspirational agreement to avoid violence, not the machinery that sustains it. Borders, armies, police, prisons, even tax codes — all are underpinned by coercion and the latent threat of harm. Pretending politics exists outside of this reality is both naïve and dangerous. It enables the morally comfortable to overlook the persistent harm done under the guise of governance, while condemning visible and spectacular acts that merely disrupt their sense of order. Violence is embedded in the decisions that decide who will survive, who will suffer, and whose lives are counted as worth protecting. Acknowledging this truth is clarity and a recognition that morality, responsibility, and accountability are inseparable from power — and that the cost of ignoring structural violence is measured in the unrecorded suffering of millions.
History offers its lessons, if we choose to pay attention. Frantz Fanon wrote about colonial violence, describing how domination is sustained not only through open warfare but through the everyday, systemic brutality that seeps into every aspect of life — schools that teach submission, laws that entrench inequality, and institutions that normalise suffering. Hannah Arendt distinguished between power and violence, illustrating that power can exist without force, but that where violence lurks unseen, power often slides into illegitimacy, coercion, and oppression. Their insights are profound, but public discourse rarely absorbs them. Instead, we prefer slogans over reflection, hashtags over comprehension, moral soundbites over sustained analysis. We condemn the visible eruption of harm while overlooking the structural, slow-burning violence that Fanon and Arendt traced across centuries and continents. In doing so, we comfort ourselves with the illusion that justice is reactive rather than systemic, that morality is instantaneous rather than measured, and that suffering must always be spectacular to be real.
I find it telling that we obsess over appearances of violence while ignoring its substance. A commotion in parliament is intolerable; a law that denies healthcare is acceptable. A street clash is scandalous; the silent erosion of rights is bureaucratic, thus invisible. It is easier to clamour moral purity from a protester than from a government that enacts policies causing real and lasting harm.
The spectacle is easier to condemn than the system.
It is tempting to want a world in which politics could be conducted without harm, where discourse alone could settle differences. But that is not reality. Every policy, every law, every budget, every border drawn is mediated by force, whether overt or structural. Violence is embedded in the very machinery of governance, in decisions that decide who lives, who suffers, and whose existence is treated as expendable. To deny this is to turn a blind eye to reality and let suffering flourish in the spaces between our attention.
And so, the conversation about violence in politics should not be about whether it exists — it obviously does — but about recognising it, naming it, and deciding collectively which forms we tolerate, which we resist, and how we hold those in power accountable.
It should not be a conversation about moral absolutes that let the powerful off the hook while shaming the powerless.
And still, we must not be nihilistic. Acknowledging that violence permeates politics does not mean celebrating it. It means being honest about the realities of power, and recognising that moral outrage is often misdirected. It means challenging not just the loud, visible instances of harm but the quiet, invisible ones that structure everyday life. It means naming the violence done to those whose suffering is socially inconvenient, politically invisible, or geographically distant.
All violence is political. Every act, every decision, every structure that inflicts harm — whether it manifests as a punch on the street, a drone strike abroad, a law that limits reproductive rights, or a health system designed to exclude — is an exercise of power. It defines who lives, who suffers, and who dies, often with terrifying precision. To say otherwise is to deny the very mechanics of governance, to ignore the invisible architecture that shapes daily existence for millions of people. Until we are willing to confront this truth, statements like “there’s no place for violence in politics” remain comforting illusions. They are shields for those who wish to preserve their own comfort, their sense of righteousness, while overlooking the harm enacted by the systems they defend. Not moral declarations.
We must care more about the truth than about appearances, more about reality than political correctness. We must be willing to see violence in all its forms, to acknowledge the weight of suffering embedded in policies, institutions, and systemic neglect, and to recognise that the quiet, bureaucratic, invisible harms can be as devastating as the spectacular ones. To speak honestly about politics is to speak about violence, not because we condone or glorify it, but because to understand governance, power, or society without seeing its impact on human lives is to live in denial. Naming it, confronting it, and refusing to allow it to hide behind euphemisms or abstractions is the first step toward accountability.
Only by recognising the omnipresence of violence can we begin to ask the hard questions: whose lives are valued, whose suffering is invisible, and what moral responsibility do we bear for the systems we maintain?
The headlines, the arrests, the rallies — they matter as they seize attention, provoke outrage, and momentarily focus the moral eye. But they are the tip of a far larger iceberg. Beneath them is a slow, grinding, bureaucratic violence that shapes lives without spectacle, applause, or fanfare. It is the structural harm embedded in budgets, laws, borders, and policies; the quiet erosion of opportunity and dignity; the everyday calculation of risk, fear, and survival that millions perform simply to live. Until we acknowledge this, until we admit that politics is inseparable from violence in all its forms, we are complicit in a deception that comforts the moral and punishes the vulnerable.
Every decision, every omission, every law passed carries consequences that ripple through bodies, communities, and generations. It shapes who wakes in safety and who wakes in fear, who gets care and who is denied it, who can hope and who must navigate life through precarity. No amount of moral rhetoric, televised outrage, or hashtags can erase that truth.
S xoxo
Written in New York, New York (Bills win!)
14th September 2025