Administrative Violence

Accounts of structural violence characterize the institutional and bureaucratic production of systematic population-level harms as violence while also construing these harms as inadvertent and unintentional. We argue that such conceptions are poorly suited to capture the relationship between administrative systems and the production of violence under settler colonialism. We offer an account of administrative violence as an organizing feature of settler colonial institutions that produces population-level harms for some and benefits for others, by design, as a rule rather than an exception. We theorize three epistemic mechanisms of administrative violence: simplification, containment, and epistemic apartheid. We demonstrate how settler administrative systems use such mechanisms to automate the production of harm for targeted populations.