Countering Structural Violence Through Community-Led Intersectional Politics of Care: A Review of Alternative Approaches to Public Safety

Recent proposals have highlighted care practices as solutions to various societal crises. In parallel, the rise of an authoritarian right-wing globally threatens already vulnerable communities. Critical insights reveal that care can be politically instrumentalized in the neoliberal era, perpetuating inequalities. In this context, care becomes privatized and individualized, maintaining racial and gender hierarchies. This paper argues that countering these neoliberal care practices involves enhancing community capacities to theorize and implement care in ways that address structural insecurities and foster nonviolent transformations. We map out a range of perspectives, including Black feminist, abolitionist, Indigenous, and anarchist views, to demonstrate how these approaches can, and already do, counter structural violence through their understandings of the politics of care. By exploring these approaches, which challenge existing notions of security governance, we consider how alternative modes of collective and progressive security governance are being reclaimed from contemporary state-led, militarized provisions of security.