Edged beyond thresholds of conventional vulnerabilities: Critical reflections on COVID‐19, women and gender

Abstract

Though Johan Galtung's extensive application of the term structural violence in peace studies has been a subject of controversy, his rendition remains critical, seminal, and influential in broad spaces of contemporary discourse including Africa's sociocultural engagements. In his epic essay: “Violence, Peace and Peace Research” he reasoned that structural violence is violence that results in harm but is not necessarily caused by any specific identifiable actor and advanced his argument to the proposition that positive peace is the absence of structural violence. This paper probes how structural violence, seen as multiple ways in which economic, social and cultural systems in Africa, specifically Ghana, leverage their cumulative strengths to edge particular populations in this context women, to the brinks and margins of Covid‐19 related risks, thus stretching women's state of affairs beyond the thresholds of traditionally held vulnerabilities. The study unveils how women's disproportionate exposure to COVID‐19 compromises public health to the detriment of human capital. It concludes that making women's rights locally relevant in Africa constitutes an important capital investment in promoting a better human rights regime for social development as the world contemplates a post‐COVID‐19 era, expressed in shared prosperity, collective security, and equity in social justice.