Abstract
This article identifies a persistent analytical asymmetry in geographical scholarship on state violence. While existing research has richly examined the structural and spatial effects of state harm, less attention has been paid to the institutional processes through which violence is enacted, justified, and normalized. In response, the article proposes an embodied perspective that redirects attention to the everyday institutional conditions through which violence becomes thinkable and legitimate. Arguing that violent space is not given but produced through organizational routines, spatial imaginaries, and justificatory practices, the article advances a theoretical reorientation for studying state violence as an embodied institutional process.
Introduction
Over the past three decades, geographical scholarship has significantly expanded our understanding of state violence across diverse spatial and political contexts. Early work engaged state violence primarily through the lenses of geopolitics, militarism, armed conflict, and territorial control, examining resource wars, counterinsurgency, occupation, and strategic statecraft (Dalby, 1990; Elden, 2009; Flint, 2003; Gregory and Pred, 2007; Kliot and Charney, 2006; Le Billon and El Khatib, 2004; Tuathail, 1996; Watts, 2004; Woodward, 2004). This scholarship established the foundational insight that violence is inseparable from spatial strategies of rule.
As geographical engagements with political violence expanded (Dempsey, 2024; Fluri, 2022), the study of state violence evolved beyond the battlefield and the borderland. Without abandoning these core arenas, scholars have increasingly exposed less visible, routinized, and spatially diffuse forms of violence. Through feminist, postcolonial, and intersectional perspectives, this shift has brought renewed attention to sites such as prisons, detention centers, urban neighborhoods, digital infrastructures, and toxic landscapes—spaces where state violence unfolds not only through direct force, but also through abandonment, surveillance, legal ambiguity, and algorithmic governance (Amoore, 2006, 2009; Davies et al., 2017; Dowler and Christian, 2019; Leshem, 2025; Martin and Mitchelson, 2009; Pulido, 2017). This body of work has been crucial in demonstrating how violence exceeds discrete events and instead permeates everyday life and governance.
Yet, despite these advances, an important asymmetry persists. Geographical scholarship has become analytically sophisticated in tracing what state violence does—how it disciplines, excludes, marginalizes, or kills—but remains comparatively less attentive to how state violence is operationalized, normalized, and made administratively ordinary within state institutions. Violence is frequently analyzed as an observable outcome inflicted upon populations, while the internal processes through which it is perceived, enacted, justified, and routinized receive less systematic examination. This gap is not merely empirical; it concerns the analytical conditions under which state violence becomes intelligible.
In response, this article argues for an embodied, practice-centered approach to state violence that foregrounds the internal and situated dynamics through which violence is enacted and legitimized. By “embodied,” I do not refer solely to the corporeal suffering of those subjected to violence, nor simply to the presence of bodies at sites of harm. Rather, embodiment signals the processes through which state authority is lived, felt, trained, and enacted within institutional settings. Police officers, soldiers, and border enforcement agents inhabit their roles through cultivated dispositions, affective calibrations, professional norms, documentary practices, and spatial imaginaries. How do such actors perceive certain actions as necessary, legitimate, or routine? How are bureaucratic procedures, discretionary judgments, emotional negotiations, and moral vocabularies assembled into practices that produce harm while appearing ordinary or inevitable?
Attending to these embodied dynamics does not displace structural analysis. Structural perspectives have powerfully illuminated how violence is embedded in broader political, economic, racial, and colonial formations. An embodied perspective extends rather than replaces these insights. It traces how such formations materialize in everyday institutional life—how systemic inequalities are translated into discretionary decisions, how legal frameworks are enacted through bodily routines, and how institutional cultures cultivate particular understandings of force, risk, and responsibility. At the same time, it reveals that structural conditions do not yield uniform outcomes across space. Even when shaped by similar geopolitical logics or security regimes, state violence takes different forms in different sociospatial contexts. Local histories, institutional cultures, professional hierarchies, and affective climates mediate how violence is perceived, justified, and implemented. Instead of treating violence as a predictable effect of structure, this approach examines the situated processes through which structural forces are interpreted, negotiated, and enacted.
This shift carries distinct geographical implications. If space is understood relationally (Massey, 1992), as constituted through the coming-together of social practices, power geometries, and institutional routines, then violent space cannot be presumed as given. A border zone, a securitized neighborhood, or a detention facility does not simply contain violence. It becomes violent through repeated encounters, administrative categorizations, patrol patterns, risk assessments, affective orientations, and justificatory narratives that sediment over time. State violence therefore does not simply occur in space; it participates in producing the spatial arrangements through which coercion becomes thinkable, legitimate, and routine. An embodied perspective helps illuminate these processes by directing attention to the everyday practices and perceptions through which such violent geographies are assembled.
State violence is not a self-evident or easily delimited category (Blakeley, 2012). While certain practices—such as militarized intervention, direct killing, torture, or overt physical misconduct—may appear relatively straightforward to identify, other forms, including deliberate abandonment, racialized surveillance, differentiated exposure to precarity, or the unequal distribution of grievability, complicate the boundaries of the concept (Butler, 2004; Coleman and Stuesse, 2016; Povinelli, 2011). Rather than advancing a rigid definition, this article adopts a working conceptualization that centers practices in which state institutions, actors, or affiliated entities are directly implicated, whether through overt force or structured omission resulting in harm or death. This framing maintains analytical focus on state institutions while allowing attention to both direct and indirect forms of violence through which harm is produced, enabled, or legitimized.
The paper proceeds in three parts. The first maps key strands in the geographical scholarship on state violence, organized around gendered violence, colonial continuities, and the technologies and tactics of state power. The second identifies a persistent analytical asymmetry in this literature, arguing that while violence has been richly theorized in terms of its effects, the internal institutional dynamics of its production remain comparatively underexamined. The third develops an embodied, practice-centered framework for studying state violence, outlining five interrelated domains—sociospatial perception, affective dynamics, occupational pressures, intra-institutional cultures, and moral justification—through which violence is enacted and normalized. The conclusion reflects on the theoretical stakes, methodological challenges, and future research directions opened by this approach.
Mapping the geographies of state violence
Structured around three interconnected themes, this section maps how geographical scholarship has conceptualized, situated, and expanded the study of state violence across diverse spatial and political contexts. Rather than offering an exhaustive survey, it identifies key analytical orientations through which geographers have traced state violence as gendered and intimate, as temporally and spatially continuous, and as sustained through evolving tactics and technological infrastructures. Taken together, these strands demonstrate that state violence operates simultaneously across scales and temporalities that blur distinctions between war and peace, past and present. In doing so, this section highlights the significant conceptual and empirical contributions of geographical research, while also setting the stage for identifying a persistent analytical asymmetry in how the internal production of violence within state institutions has been comparatively underexamined.
Gendered violence: The global intimate
Among the various geographical studies on state violence, feminist geographers have produced some of the most comprehensive and theoretically rich analyses. Since the 1990s, their work has drawn attention both to the need for gender-aware political geography (Dalby, 1994; Dowler, 1998; Hyndman, 1998; Kofman and Peake, 1990) and, more specifically, to the nexus between gender and state violence, especially through themes such as displacement, militarism, sexual violence, and everyday insecurity (Giles and Hyndman, 2004; Hanlon and Shankar, 2000; Sharp, 1996; Wright, 2001). Building on this foundation, feminist geographers have developed intersectional critiques that reveal the sexualized, racialized, and classed dimensions of state violence and highlight the co-constitution of state power and everyday harm. In doing so, their work has drawn on interdisciplinary dialogues and methodological approaches ranging from ethnography to critical theory.
One of the foundational arguments within this body of work is that everyday violence and state violence are not separate phenomena but rather products of the same institutional and socio-political structures (Cockburn, 2004; Cuomo, 2013; N. Graham and Brickell, 2019; Jokela-Pansini, 2020; Little, 2020; Mojab, 2004; Natanel, 2016; Pain, 2014, 2015, Piedalue, 2017; C. E. Smith, 2016). Studies in Egypt and Honduras (Jokela-Pansini, 2020; Smith, 2016), for example, demonstrate how patriarchal and militarized structures link intimate household hierarchies with state violence, revealing systemic gendered power relations operating from domestic spaces to state institutions. As Brickell (2015) and Laliberté (2016) argue, neglecting this interconnection risks overlooking structural conditions sustaining violence.
A longstanding focus within feminist political geography has examined the role of gendered violence in war and militarism, emphasizing how acts such as rape function as deliberate strategies of warfare and territorial control (Hanlon and Shankar, 2000; Mayer, 2004). This concern persists, as illustrated by Trenholm et al. (2016), who show how sexual violence across geopolitical contexts reinforces patriarchal domination and fractures social life. Glockner et al. (2023) further expand this analysis through the feminist decolonial concept of cuerpo-territorio, illustrating how bodily harm and sexual violence are wielded by state, paramilitary, and criminal actors to exert territorial and socio-political dominance—revealing the intertwined dynamics of gender, coloniality, and geopolitical power. Importantly, geographical scholarship has also exposed how such violence is not confined to enemy bodies or wartime contexts (Christian et al., 2015; Dowler, 2011; Woodward and Winter, 2007). Dowler (2011), for instance, demonstrates that women in the U.S. military are rendered vulnerable within their own institution, highlighting how militarized gender hierarchies persist beyond formal battlefields.
While the state–gender nexus has often been examined through the lens of sexual violence and war crimes, feminist geographers have also broadened the discussion to explore corporeal and intimate dimensions of geopolitical violence. This work has reframed civilian bodies, domestic spaces, and emotions as active sites of violence and contestation (Brickell, 2014; Christian et al., 2015; Fluri, 2009, 2011a, 2011b, Hyndman, 2019; Little, 2020; Öcal, 2020b; Pain, 2009; S. Smith, 2012). Feminist scholarship thus extends analysis beyond direct physical harm to encompass insecurity, displacement, fear, and reproductive control as forms of gendered geopolitical violence. These contributions have made it possible to identify less visible, yet equally pervasive, forms of harm embedded in the everyday geographies of state power.
While much of feminist geographical scholarship has exposed the subtle and pervasive operations of state violence, it has equally emphasized how resistance emerges within and against these everyday geographies of harm (Fluri, 2011b; Hanlon and Shankar, 2000; Jokela-Pansini, 2020; Koopman, 2011a; Mountz, 2020; Spiegel, 2021; Wright, 2018). By tracing how dissent is enacted through specific geographies—whether in conflict zones, bureaucratic spaces, or intimate settings—this body of work advances key debates in human geography concerning power, place, and agency. Across varied geographical contexts, such resistance is enacted through embodied presence (Brickell, 2014), humor and irony (Fluri, 2011b, 2019), personal testimonies (Pratt, 2012), and solidaristic forms of care and collective organizing (Vasudevan and Smith, 2020). In recent years, data feminism has added another dimension to these struggles. Responding to state failures to document feminicide (D’Ignazio, 2024; D’Ignazio et al., 2025; Lucchesi, 2022), feminist counterdata initiatives produce grassroots maps and alternative archives that spatialize violence and contest epistemic erasure.
Taken together, this body of feminist geographical scholarship compels a fundamental rethinking of how state violence is conceptualized and where it is located. Rather than treating violence as an exceptional rupture or as a phenomenon confined to conflict zones and authoritarian regimes, these works insist on tracing its operation across intimate, institutional, and everyday spaces. Central to this reorientation is the notion of the “global intimate,” which underscores how geopolitical power and gendered harm are co-produced through embodied practices, affective encounters, and domestic sites (Faria, 2017; Mountz and Hyndman, 2006; Pratt and Rosner, 2012; Sharp, 2022). Besides, feminist geographers have demonstrated that these same spaces are also sites of resistance, where individuals and communities challenge state violence through subtle, situated, and multiscalar practices. In doing so, feminist geography has significantly expanded the spatial and conceptual terrain through which state violence can be analyzed.
The temporal and spatial continuum of state violence
The conceptualization of gendered state violence provided by geographers, with its emphasis on multiscalar connections, resonates closely with other scholarly approaches that argue political violence should not be seen as static or limited to isolated events. Rather, it must be conceptualized as an enduring and connected process across temporal, spatial, and ontological dimensions. This perspective highlights the embedded, persistent, and evolving nature of state violence, rather than viewing it as episodic or exceptional.
One of the key arguments in this field is that colonial relationships are not relics of the past but persist across different spaces, bodies, and minds (Blomley, 2003; De Leeuw, 2016; Forde, 2022; Gregory, 2004; Kearns, 2007; Preston and Wong, 2004; J. A. Tyner, 2010; Ybarra, 2018). For instance, Gregory’s (2004) work on the “colonial present” examines the enduring legacies of colonialism, demonstrating how its violent structures continue to shape contemporary cultural, political, and economic landscapes. This analysis disrupts simple temporal separations, arguing that colonialism actively informs modern geopolitical discourses, including narratives surrounding the “war on terror,” civilization, and barbarism. Similarly, De Leeuw’s (2016) research on Canada reveals how colonial legal and structural violence continues to shape Indigenous women and children’s lives. Extending this critique in a distinct yet related direction, Lucchesi’s work (2022) further argues that even contemporary mapping and data practices concerning violence against Indigenous women are embedded in colonial power relations, reproducing rather than merely documenting violence.
Colonial continuities extend beyond historical imperial relationships. Within nation-states, colonial logics operate domestically through the marginalization and regulation of racialized populations. As emphasized in political ecology scholarship, geographical research has increasingly illuminated how human-made environmental degradation functions as a form of state violence, disproportionately impacting racialized and domestically colonized communities (Davies, 2018, 2022; Kaur, 2021; Kurtz, 2009; Pulido, 2017; Van Sant et al., 2021; Vasudevan and Smith, 2020). Pulido (2017) challenges the idea of the state as a neutral actor, framing it instead as an active perpetrator of environmental racism. Kaur (2021) conceptualizes nuclear pollution in India as a state-sanctioned “letting die,” while Vasudevan and Smith (2020) interpret exposure to toxins as domestic colonialism that reproduces dispossession.
State violence’s continuity is not only spatial and temporal but also ontological, blurring the boundary between war and peace. As contemporary geographical scholarship highlights, there is no absolute rupture between war and peace; rather, forms of violence persist and shape everyday life even in so-called “peacetime” contexts (Bernazzoli and Flint, 2009; Cockburn, 2004; Dijkema et al., 2024; Flint, 2005; Gregory, 2010; Jacobsen, 2022; Koopman, 2011b; Loyd, 2009; Natanel, 2016; Secor, 2007; S. Graham, 2010). Jacobsen (2022), for instance, shows that displacement does not end violence for Syrian refugees but reconfigures it through border regimes, precarious legal statuses, and exclusionary policies. Similarly, Schmid-Scott (2025) demonstrates how seemingly mundane administrative practices within asylum systems operate as part of a continuum of violence, where routine reporting procedures expose migrants to surveillance, destitution, and the constant threat of detention and deportation. Natanel (2016), likewise, demonstrates how militarism permeates everyday life, collapsing distinctions between frontlines and civilian spaces. In this sense, state violence does not simply erupt in war but mutates and persists within the affective, spatial, and gendered geographies of so-called peace.
By tracing these temporal and spatial continuities, geographers demonstrate that state violence does not simply end with formal decolonization or the cessation of armed conflict. Rather than appearing only in moments of crisis, it persists through legal regimes, environmental exposures, militarized governance, and border controls that structure everyday life. In this sense, violence is not an episodic rupture but an enduring condition that connects past and present, war and peace, and colonial and domestic forms of domination. Across these literatures, a shared insight emerges: state violence operates through dispersed and often normalized mechanisms that embed harm within ordinary political and social processes.
Tactics and technologies of state violence
Acknowledging that state violence is continuous across time and space, recent geographical scholarship focuses on the mechanisms that sustain and adapt this continuity. It examines how state violence is maintained through evolving tactics and technologies that operate both visibly and invisibly. These include not only digital surveillance and military tools but also legal, bureaucratic, and environmental strategies that extend state violence while obscuring responsibility. This section examines how such instruments—ranging from impunity to algorithmic governance—contribute to the normalization and diffusion of violence, expanding the spatial reach and subtlety of its operation.
A growing body of research demonstrates how technological advancements have expanded the possibilities of state violence (Amoore, 2020; Birtchnell, 2017; Jefferson, 2017; Klauser, 2017; Meehan et al., 2013; Safransky, 2020; Shaw, 2016; Wall, 2016; S. Graham, 2010). For instance, Shaw’s work (2016) explores the dronification of warfare, illustrating how drones extend state control into atmospheric spaces and create a persistent, immersive surveillance system capable of instilling fear, enforcing intimidation, and exercising violent control from above. Wall (2016) further conceptualizes drone violence not as exceptional, but as a continuation of police power embedded in the management of perceived threats. Together, these analyses show how remote technologies normalize discretionary and extrajudicial violence.
Amoore’s (2006) research offers a parallel argument regarding algorithmic technologies, demonstrating how digital surveillance tools originally developed for commercial purposes have been repurposed by states to assess and preemptively manage security risks. These systems embed calculations of suspicion and exclusion into everyday spaces, merging state power with digital capitalism and reshaping contemporary geographies of violence. Jefferson (2017) extends this analysis, demonstrating how crime mapping technologies construct racialized threat zones under the veneer of scientific objectivity. These tools mobilize civilians into surveillance networks and normalize racialized state violence while making it less visible.
While technology has expanded the reach of state violence, legal and bureaucratic tools similarly allow states to harm marginalized populations while avoiding accountability. One key focus in recent scholarship is state violence against migrants (Dempsey, 2020; Dhesi et al., 2018; R. Jones, 2016; Kreichauf, 2021; Morgan, 2024; Mountz, 2020; Shakhsari, 2014; Tazzioli and De Genova, 2020). This research shows how states deploy “abandonment” and “inaction” as techniques of border enforcement, exposing migrants to life-threatening conditions while framing harm as incidental. Particularly in recent years, as Schindel (2022) defined, “mediated agency of environmental or ‘natural’ forces in the production of border-related violence” has gained significant scholarly attention (Davies et al., 2017; Davies and Isakjee, 2015; Stel, 2021; Wright, 2011). States strategically use deserts, seas, or weather as deterrents, conceptualized as geoviolence by Komposch (2025), justifying inhumane policies while shifting blame away from enforcement. By attributing harm to nature, they obscure responsibility and reinforce border regimes with reduced public scrutiny. For instance, Slack et al. (2016) show how harsh desert conditions along the U.S.–Mexico border are intentionally weaponized to deter crossings, while Davies et al. (2017) demonstrate how systematic denial of basic provisions in refugee camps constitutes violent inaction.
Mountz’s (2020) study complements this body of work by examining how physical geography and legal ambiguity are strategically deployed as instruments of state violence. Through the “enforcement archipelago,” remote islands and jurisdictional gray zones are used to isolate migrants and place them beyond legal protection. Mountz’s analysis aligns with a broader geographical literature that has pointed out how legal processes themselves increasingly operate as instruments or facilitators of state violence (Brickell, 2016; Brickell and Cuomo, 2019; C. Jones, 2020; Kreichauf, 2021; Mountz, 2020; Reiz & O’Lear, 2016). For instance, Jones (2020) shows how military lawyers participate in the juridical interpretation and operationalization of lethal force, revealing that law does not merely constrain violence but can actively enable, authorize, and normalize it.
In addition to facilitating geopolitical violence, another major legal tactic that structures and perpetuates state violence is impunity, which shields both individual state actors and broader institutional systems from accountability (Brickell, 2017; Dowler and Christian, 2019; Pratt, 2005; Trenholm et al., 2016). Reiz and O’Lear’s study (2016) on UN military personnel in Haiti reveals how jurisdictional immunity granted to peacekeepers creates significant obstacles to justice for survivors of sexual violence. Similarly, Dowler and Christian (2019) show how suspicious deaths of African American women are ruled suicides, exposing how legal classifications obscure structural violence.
Ultimately, scholarship on tactics and technologies of state violence reveals the evolving and often concealed mechanisms through which states exert control. Rather than focusing solely on overt militarized force or visible police brutality, geographical research demonstrates how violence is embedded in legal frameworks, digital infrastructures, bureaucratic routines, and environmental landscapes. By tracing how borders, bodies, and environments are strategically mobilized through both action and inaction, this literature shows how contemporary violence is mediated through infrastructures, classifications, and administrative practices that render harm less visible while extending its reach.
An analytical asymmetry: Disembodied accounts of state violence
Taken together, the scholarship reviewed in the section above has profoundly transformed how geographers understand state violence. We now recognize that state violence is gendered, racialized, temporally continuous, technologically mediated, and embedded in everyday life. Research has traced its operation across battlefields and borderlands, prisons and detention centers, digital infrastructures, environmental degradation, and legal regimes. Yet, despite this conceptual and empirical richness, a persistent tendency remains: state violence is frequently treated as a self-evident reality whose manifestations and consequences demand analysis, rather than as a phenomenon whose ontological foundations require interrogation. These tendencies result in what might be described as disembodied accounts of state violence.
In many accounts, violence appears as a self-evident reality, with emphasis placed on its effects while its underlying processes remain largely unexamined. Although state violence is widely understood to be gendered, racialized, and enacted through various tactics, it is still frequently seen as a pre-existing force rather than something actively constructed and reproduced in institutions. As Tyner and Inwood (2014, p. 772) compellingly argue: We all too often acknowledge that violence has occurred; but once established, we quickly move on to other fields to tend. We study the aftermath of violence (…), the legal response to violence (…), [while] the act of violence and the social conditions that produce and are produced by violence in the first place becomes a black box, assumed, acknowledged, but rarely theorized.
This concern resonates across academic literature both within and beyond geography. For example, in their analysis of racialized and gendered immigration enforcement in the US, Coleman and Stuesse (2016, p. 526) similarly contend that “the bulk of the immigration literature investigates the gendered, raced, sexualized, and classed outcomes of state power in immigrant communities, but leaves under-investigated the problem of state power itself as practiced in these ways.”
I argue that this tendency stems, in part, from a disembodied approach to state violence which does not regard the state as a collection of individuals making decisions within specific social, political, and bureaucratic contexts. Violence is often analyzed as a finished product—like a factory output—while the internal operations of that factory remain underexplored: who decides, how policies are debated, and which practices keep the system running. The state appears as an abstract and coherent actor, while the institutional processes through which violence is perceived, justified, negotiated, and routinized recede into the background.
Part of this blind spot may also be traced to longstanding analytical habits within political geography. Structural and macro-scalar analyses of power have been indispensable for understanding how violence is embedded in broader economic, colonial, and geopolitical formations. However, these orientations can inadvertently render less visible the embodied and affective dimensions of institutional practice. The emphasis on systemic harm, territorial strategy, and structural inequality, while crucial, may leave underexamined how such structures materialize through everyday bureaucratic routines, discretionary decisions, and professional socialization.
This argument does not imply that geography has ignored embodiment. On the contrary, since the 1990s, the concept of embodiment has been central to feminist geography (Gökarıksel and Secor, 2018; Koefoed and Simonsen, 2019; Longhurst, 2001; Moss, 2005; Sultana, 2011; Thien, 2005; Zaragocin and Caretta, 2021). Scholars have explored people’s embodied interactions with space, place, and power across various themes, including geopolitics and nation-building (Mayer, 2004; Militz et al., 2022; Militz and Schurr, 2016; Öcal and Gökarıksel, 2022; Perler et al., 2023; S. Smith, 2011), activism (Brickell, 2014; Koopman, 2011a) and ecological destruction (Glockner et al., 2023; Perreault, 2018; Sultana, 2011). As the “Gendered violence” section has shown, the embodied effects of state violence on those subjected to it have been extensively documented. What remains comparatively underdeveloped, however, is attention to embodiment on the side of those who enact and institutionalize violence.
Even though in geography and other disciplines scholars have long demonstrated the peopled face of bureaucracy and state structures (Cooper, 2019; Ferguson and Gupta, 2002; Lipsky, 2010; McConnell, 2016; Medby, 2018; Mountz, 2004; Painter, 2006), this sensibility has rarely been systematically extended to analyses of state violence. Calls to “study up” have been pivotal in unsettling abstract and monolithic conceptions of the state, revealing instead how state power is coordinated through everyday institutional practices, documentary regimes, discretionary judgments, and situated decision-making processes (Belcher and Martin, 2013; Billo and Mountz, 2016; Mountz, 2004; Pearson and Crane, 2017). This work demonstrates that the state is assembled through the labor of officials, the circulation of documents, and the negotiation of authority within bureaucratic settings. Yet, although we now possess rich accounts of how policies are implemented, how institutions function, and how power is organized, we have far fewer grounded analyses of how violence is assembled, rationalized, sustained, and routinized within the everyday lives of those who enact it. The result is an analytical asymmetry: we have studied up on the state, and we have studied the effects of state violence, but we have only rarely studied up on state violence as a situated institutional practice.
The blind spot, then, is not the absence of critical scholarship on state violence, but a relative disembodiment in how the state itself is conceptualized within such analyses. Violence is frequently understood as something the state does, but less often as something produced through the situated practices of those who inhabit its institutions. If violence is treated primarily as an observable manifestation or structural condition, the everyday labor, affective negotiations, and discretionary judgments that render it possible risk remaining analytically obscured. It is to this gap that an embodied, practice-centered perspective must turn.
Embodying state violence: Institutional practices, dispositions, and everyday production
To move beyond treating violence as a finished outcome and instead approach it as a process produced within institutional settings, this section advances an embodied, practice-centered perspective on state violence. Such a perspective directs attention to how violence is assembled through the lived routines, emotional calibrations, and discretionary judgments of those who inhabit state institutions. Rather than asking only what violence does, it asks how violence comes to be perceived as necessary, legitimate, or ordinary within specific bureaucratic environments.
As Tyner (2012, p. 4) suggests, this entails “step[ping] inside the minds of violent people and try[ing] to understand how they perceive the world around them – their spaces and places and how these environments influence their actions.” This does not imply psychologizing violence or reducing it to individual morality. Instead, it situates actors within institutional cultures, policy frameworks, and professional norms, examining how structural conditions are translated into embodied practices. Violence, from this perspective, is neither purely structural nor purely individual; it is mediated through trained dispositions, administrative procedures, and everyday interactions.
An embodied approach does not displace structural analyses of state violence. Structural perspectives have illuminated the colonial continuities, racial hierarchies, economic logics, and geopolitical strategies within which violence unfolds. What an embodied perspective adds is greater analytical precision regarding how these structures materialize in practice. Similar structural conditions can generate different forms of violence across sites. To understand these variations, we must examine how institutions function from within: how laws are interpreted, policies debated, discretion exercised, and responsibility distributed across bureaucratic hierarchies. Rendering structures tangible requires situating them within the social, institutional, and geographic contexts in which they are enacted.
Embodiment draws attention to how bodies experience and express identities, power relations, locations, and material conditions (Clark, 2013; Mayer, 2004; Mountz, 2004; Sharp, 2007). Perceptions, emotions, and judgments are always mediated through the body and shaped by situated histories. As embodiment foregrounds the partial, relational, and context-dependent nature of knowledge, it resonates with Haraway’s (1988) notion of situated knowledges and with more recent feminist elaborations (Zaragocin and Caretta, 2021). Bodies and environments are mutually constitutive; institutions are inhabited, felt, and performed rather than merely designed.
This insight has generated a rich body of research examining how state institutions are lived and enacted in everyday settings. Studies of migration control, diplomacy, policing, and governance have traced the circulation of emotion within bureaucracies, the tensions between policy and practice, and the representational labor through which officials perform the state (Cuomo, 2021; Darling, 2022; Garmany, 2009, 2014, Gill, 2016; Hall, 2010; A. Jones and Clark, 2015; C. Jones, 2020; Kuus, 2008, 2015, Medby, 2018; Mountz, 2004, 2010, Müller, 2012; Prokkola and Ridanpää, 2015; Proudfoot and McCann, 2008; Woodward and Jenkings, 2012; Campos-Delgado and Côté-Boucher, 2024). Although most of these studies do not focus on acts such as killing or torture, they illuminate how state authority is enacted through discretion, uncertainty management, documentary practices, and professional identity formation.
Read through the lens of state violence, these contributions offer more than contextual background. They reveal the mechanisms that can enable, normalize, and sustain violent outcomes. Administrative delay, procedural ambiguity, the routinization of suspicion, the emotional distancing cultivated in professional training, and the diffusion of responsibility across hierarchical chains are not neutral bureaucratic features. They are conditions under which harm can be organized, justified, and rendered mundane. In this sense, embodiment provides access to the infrastructures of perception and decision-making through which violence is made possible.
Building on these theoretical and empirical contributions, I argue that they provide important foundations for developing more explicit embodied approaches to the study of state violence. Rather than beginning with spectacular acts of force, such approaches examine how everyday institutional practices assemble the conditions of violence. To operationalize this perspective, I identify five key areas that merit further exploration. Within each, I outline how existing studies of bureaucracy, discretion, affect, professional socialization, and institutional culture can be extended to analyze the dynamics of state violence in more grounded and analytically precise
Perceiving and producing sociospatial contexts
State violence is never enacted in neutral space. It is shaped through how state actors perceive, interpret, and narrate the sociospatial environments in which they operate. Officers do not simply apply law across a pre-given terrain; they construct mental maps of risk, disorder, proximity, and legitimacy that guide discretionary action. Understanding these spatial perceptions is therefore crucial to grasping how and where violence becomes thinkable and actionable.
A long line of scholarship on policing and governance shows that state practices vary significantly across spatial contexts, not only because of formal policy differences but because of how officers interpret place. Classic studies of British policing demonstrate that officers perform their roles differently in urban and rural settings, adopting crime-fighting postures in cities while acting as community peacekeepers in rural areas (Banton, 1964; Cain, 1973; Young, 1993, cited in Dick, 2005). These differences are not merely administrative; they reflect contrasting spatial imaginaries about what kinds of order are required in particular environments. Similarly, Herbert’s (1997) work illustrates how police decisions are guided less by abstract legal codes than by locally embedded notions of moral order and spatial risk. Officers act in relation to what they perceive a neighborhood to be, who they believe belongs there, and what forms of conduct are considered tolerable or threatening.
Sociospatial perception does not shape the exercise of state authority only by marking certain spaces as distant, dangerous, or outside the norm. It can also operate through proximity. Garmany’s (2014) research on policing in Brazilian favelas demonstrates that spatial closeness between officers and residents can intensify, rather than mitigate, violent control. Where police and community members share similar socioeconomic backgrounds, the symbolic distinction between state authority and civil society becomes unstable. In such contexts, aggression can function as a performative strategy to reassert hierarchical difference and reinforce the boundary between state and community. Violence, in this sense, is not simply a reaction to crime but a spatial practice through which the state reconstitutes its authority.
This sociospatial perception is not limited to overtly violent encounters. Research on regulatory and inspection practices demonstrates how officials’ geographical imaginations shape enforcement priorities and discretionary judgments. Proudfoot and McCann (2008), for example, show how inspectors develop informal “mental maps” of compliance and deviance, deciding where to look closely and where to overlook infractions based on accumulated assumptions about particular areas and populations. These findings suggest that the spatialization of suspicion and tolerance precedes specific acts of coercion.
Work on border enforcement further illustrates how readings of space can become a direct mechanism of harm. Studies of border violence reveal how officers mobilize terrain strategically, channeling migrants into deserts, remote zones, or environmentally hostile landscapes where exposure becomes a deterrent (Davies et al., 2017; Schindel, 2022; Slack et al., 2016; Stel, 2021). Even when officers do not directly inflict physical force, their environmental assessments—what is considered uninhabitable, dangerous, or peripheral—structure conditions under which abandonment becomes possible. “Violent inaction” (Davies et al., 2017), thus, rests on particular readings of space that naturalize suffering as an effect of geography rather than of policy.
Taken together, this scholarship demonstrates how spatial imaginaries shape the everyday exercise of state authority. Officers’ interpretations of neighborhoods, borders, and institutional environments shape how discretion is exercised, how risk is allocated, and how authority is asserted. Viewed through the lens of state violence, these studies help reveal how particular spatial interpretations can render coercion thinkable, legitimate, and actionable in specific contexts. An embodied analysis of state violence therefore requires examining not only the formal architecture of law and policy but also the lived geographies through which state actors classify space, assess threat, and decide when coercion is warranted. By foregrounding sociospatial perception, we gain insight into the everyday interpretive practices through which violence becomes unevenly distributed across places and populations.
Affective landscapes of bureaucratic power
An embodied approach to state violence requires taking seriously the affective environments within which state actors operate. Emotions are not incidental to bureaucratic practice; they are integral to how authority is exercised, how decisions are made, and how harm becomes tolerable. Rather than treating violence as the mechanical application of policy, an affective lens reveals how fear, anxiety, empathy, exhaustion, and moral tension shape the everyday enactment of state power.
Feminist geography has long demonstrated that emotions are central to political life and to the production of power (Ahmed, 2004; Bondi, 2005; Christian et al., 2015; Davidson et al., 2007; Sultana, 2011; Öcal, 2020a). When extended to the study of state institutions, this insight directs attention to how bureaucracies function as affective spaces. Ethnographic research in detention and migration control settings shows that officers operate within emotionally charged environments marked by confinement, pressure, and uncertainty. Mountz’s (2017) work on remote detention sites illustrates how officers, like detainees, experience strain, exhaustion, and isolation. These affective conditions do not remain internal; they materialize in forms of detachment, withdrawal, and routinized indifference that condition interactions with those in custody.
Similarly, Gill’s (2016) research demonstrates that repeated exposure to suffering produces not necessarily compassion but emotional numbing and what he describes as “overfamiliarity” with trauma. Detachment becomes a technique of self-preservation. Hall (2010) further shows how institutional uncertainty and suspicion foster fear-driven distancing, sharpening the divide between citizen and “other” and reinforcing detainees’ abject status. Across these contexts, anxiety is not merely personal; it is structured by media scrutiny, public discourse, and organizational expectations (Gill, 2016; Mountz, 2017). Officers’ fear of appearing too lenient or overly sympathetic generates emotional tensions that often push them to align with institutional imperatives over personal empathy.
Importantly, affective life within bureaucracies is not reducible to fear or hostility. Emotions such as empathy, shame, and moral discomfort also circulate. Gill (2016) documents officers who express unease with their roles, request transfers, or leave the service altogether. Campos-Delgado and Côté-Boucher (2024) show how some officers informally reinterpret rules to mitigate detainees’ suffering, bending procedures in small but meaningful ways. These moments reveal that institutional environments are sites of affective negotiation rather than uniform emotional regimes.
Therefore, this body of scholarship highlights how affective dynamics shape the everyday exercise of state authority within bureaucratic settings. Emotional distancing, moral strain, anxiety about public judgment, and the management of empathy influence how officials interpret policy, exercise discretion, and navigate institutional expectations. Viewed through the lens of state violence, these affective calibrations help reveal the conditions under which coercion becomes emotionally manageable, administratively routine, and institutionally defensible. By foregrounding these affective landscapes, an embodied approach makes visible the emotional infrastructures through which harm can be normalized, sustained, or, at times, quietly contested within state institutions.
Institutional pressures and the labor of enforcement
Enforcement is carried out not by abstract agents but by workers embedded in institutional hierarchies, performance metrics, managerial reforms, and often precarious employment structures. These conditions shape not only workplace morale but also how discretion is exercised, how time is managed, and how individuals are processed within bureaucratic systems. Understanding the labor of enforcement therefore becomes essential for grasping how harmful practices can emerge within the everyday operation of state institutions.
Geographical scholarship has shown that state institutions are increasingly shaped by performance expectations, political scrutiny, and managerial reforms. Mountz (2010) describes how, under intense media and governmental pressure to demonstrate effective border control, officers detained undocumented migrants as a performative assertion of institutional competence. Enforcement, in this context, was not solely a response to policy but a response to scrutiny. Actions became visible signs of control, calibrated to political and public expectations.
Research on the UK’s National Asylum Support Service further illustrates how organizational fragmentation and reform reshape the conditions of bureaucratic work. Gill (2016) documents deep disconnections between local and central offices, inefficient communication channels, and uneven resource distribution. Officers often felt isolated and unsupported, struggling to navigate complex cases without institutional backing. The introduction of market-oriented reforms intensified these pressures, prioritizing efficiency, speed, and cost reduction. Asylum claims were translated into files, deadlines, and statistical outputs, generating what Gill terms “moral remoteness”—a distancing from the human realities embedded in administrative decisions.
Labor precarity can further intensify these dynamics. Campos-Delgado and Côté-Boucher (2024) show how migration officers in Mexico work long shifts under insecure contracts, frequently without adequate rest, pay, or basic workplace provisions. Exhaustion and frustration are not incidental; they are built into the organization of enforcement. Officers’ accounts of losing patience or reacting harshly in moments of fatigue point to the embodied limits of bureaucratic labor.
Collectively, these studies highlight how the institutional organization of work shapes the everyday exercise of state authority. Performance metrics, hierarchical fragmentation, resource scarcity, and precarious labor conditions structure how officials interpret rules, allocate attention, and relate to those under their authority. Viewed through the lens of state violence, these organizational pressures help illuminate how harmful practices can emerge not only from individual intent or emotional disposition but also from the material and managerial conditions under which enforcement is carried out.
Intra-institutional cultures and the normalization of force
Intra-institutional cultures play a crucial role in shaping how state authority is enacted in everyday institutional life. A substantial body of scholarship has demonstrated that formal policy only partially explains how the state operates; what often proves crucial is how frontline agents enact, interpret, and adapt state power in everyday contexts (Herbert, 1997, 2008; Kuus, 2008, 2015; Medby, 2018; Mountz, 2010). These enactments are shaped by intra-institutional cultures—informal norms, shared beliefs, rituals, jokes, hierarchies, and routine practices that organize how institutions function beyond official rules. Such cultures influence what counts as professional competence, loyalty, or appropriate conduct. Understanding how officers inhabit and reproduce these normative environments is therefore central to analyzing the conditions under which violence is normalized, rewarded, or shielded.
Research across policing and bureaucratic settings demonstrates how institutional cultures organize expectations of loyalty, toughness, and discretion. Herbert’s (1997) study shows how internal police culture valorizes bravery, risk-taking, and machismo as markers of professional credibility. Aggressive behavior in confrontational encounters can generate informal status and peer recognition, while alternative forms of policing are marginalized. Masculinity becomes a central axis of legitimacy: “real” officers are those who display physical courage and assertiveness, whereas desk-bound or administrative roles are feminized and ridiculed. Such gendered hierarchies do not simply reflect personality traits; they structure what counts as competent action, subtly rewarding confrontational styles that may escalate force. Other research similarly shows how departmental cultures and leadership philosophies shape how officers interpret and enact policy in practice. Cuomo’s (2021) ethnographic study of domestic violence policing in the U.S. demonstrates how differing policing philosophies within departments—for example, community-oriented versus traditional approaches—produce uneven enforcement of mandatory arrest policies, as officers adapt or circumvent formal rules through everyday discretionary practices.
Institutional cultures also operate through mechanisms of mutual protection and silence. Gill’s (2016) research on detention centers documents a strong ethos of solidarity among officers, in which complaints filed by detainees are met with collective defensiveness or retaliation. Accountability is reframed as betrayal, and internal cohesion is prioritized over transparency. In such environments, misconduct becomes harder to challenge, and violence is not only enacted but shielded. Informal norms thus sustain conditions in which coercive practices can persist without formal endorsement.
These studies highlight how collective codes of conduct extend beyond formal rules to shape the everyday exercise of state authority. Norms of loyalty, gendered status hierarchies, and informal sanctions influence how officers respond to conflict, interpret restraint, and assess the risks of accountability. Viewed through the lens of state violence, these institutional cultures help illuminate how coercive practices can become normalized, valorized, or protected within everyday professional life—not solely through policy mandates but through the social worlds of the institutions themselves.
Justifying violence: Moral frameworks and the normalization of harm
Moral reasoning plays a central role in how violence becomes interpretable and defensible within state institutions. Violence rarely appears to its perpetrators as self-evidently wrongful. Rather, it is interpreted, reframed, and narrated within moral vocabularies that cast coercion as protection, enforcement as care, and exclusion as necessity. Moral reasoning is not an afterthought to violence—it is part of the process through which violence becomes sustainable within institutions.
Geographical scholarship demonstrates how such justificatory frameworks operate across military and bureaucratic settings. In their study of British soldiers’ memoirs from Afghanistan, Woodward and Jenkings (2012) show how military actors narrate their participation through registers of protection, sacrifice, and civilizational duty. References to preventing jihadist threats, disrupting drug routes, or advancing women’s rights reposition military intervention as ethical responsibility rather than occupation. Through these narratives, violence is incorporated into a moral story about security and global order.
A parallel dynamic appears in border enforcement contexts. Campos-Delgado and Côté-Boucher (2024) document how Mexican migration officers frame detention not as punishment but as rescue. Enforcement is narrated as a humanitarian intervention designed to protect migrants from greater danger. This salvational discourse does not deny coercion; it reframes it. By embedding enforcement within a language of empathy and care, officers construct a moral shield that obscures the coercive and repressive dimensions of their actions. Related research further shows how humanitarian practices at the border can become entwined with enforcement regimes themselves, as rescue initiatives and practices of migrant care operate alongside detention and deportation systems, helping to sustain and morally legitimize coercive forms of border governance (Williams, 2015).
Across these contexts, justificatory narratives perform critical institutional work. They do more than excuse harm after the fact—they organize how violence is anticipated, interpreted, and defended in advance. Appeals to national security, humanitarian rescue, moral duty, or public order provide ethical grammars through which coercive practices are normalized. An embodied analysis of state violence therefore requires tracing how such moral frameworks circulate within institutions, how they are internalized by actors, and how they stabilize violence as an acceptable, even necessary, dimension of governance.
Conclusion
This paper has mapped key strands in the geographical scholarship on state violence and identified a persistent analytical asymmetry. While geographers have produced sophisticated accounts of gendered violence, colonial continuities, and the technologies and tactics of state power, state violence is still most often analyzed through its effects on bodies, communities, and landscapes. Across disciplines, research on state violence has understandably centered on victims rather than perpetrators, as highlighted by Sluka (2000, p. 10) and Tomforde and Ben-Ari (2021, p. 3). While this emphasis is ethically necessary, it leaves comparatively underexplored the institutional processes through which violence is enacted, justified, and normalized. At the same time, much critical theory of state violence has offered powerful vocabularies for thinking about sovereignty, exception, and the making of the state’s margins, yet it has not always remained empirically close to how these dynamics are administered in spatially differentiated settings. As Mountz (2010, p. xxix) observes, influential theoretical approaches frequently lack grounding in the specific, uneven contexts where exclusion is operationalized and made durable. Taken together, these tendencies risk treating state violence as an already-formed outcome rather than as a process assembled through everyday institutional practices. By advancing an embodied, practice-centered perspective, this paper calls for closer attention to the internal dynamics of state institutions and the dispositions through which violence becomes administratively ordinary.
A relational understanding of space offers a concise way of naming what is at issue here. For Massey (1992), space is not a container but a provisional coming-together of relations, a simultaneity of stories-so-far. Violent space, then, is not given in advance. A border zone, a neighborhood, or a detention facility does not simply host violence; it becomes violent through encounters, bureaucratic routines, surveillance practices, affective calibrations, and justificatory narratives that converge over time. In this sense, state violence does not merely unfold in space; it participates in producing the spatial conditions in which it can recur.
This argument also connects to a broader unease within geography regarding how violence has been conceptualized. Recent interventions have called for more careful and nuanced approaches that resist treating violence as an ontological given, reducing it to isolated events, or attributing it to cultural essence. Studies such as Springer (2011), Tyner and Inwood (2014), and Laurie and Shaw (2018) have each, in different ways, pushed the field toward more relational and politically attentive conceptualizations of violence. My contribution aligns with these calls while shifting the focus more explicitly toward the institutional and embodied processes through which state violence is enacted. Without positioning perpetrators as the sole explanatory center, an embodied perspective renders more visible how violence takes form through trained dispositions, affective calibrations, documentary practices, and moral vocabularies within state institutions. In this sense, the argument is not only that violence is relational and conditioned, but that it is operationalized through specific processes of enactment that demand closer empirical attention.
At this point, it is important to acknowledge that moving toward an embodied analysis of state violence raises significant methodological and ethical challenges. Accessing security institutions and law enforcement bureaucracies is notoriously difficult due to secrecy, political sensitivity, and organizational closure (Coleman and Kocher, 2019; Coleman and Stuesse, 2016; Kuus, 2015; Sparke, 2006; Öcal, 2025). Researchers must therefore develop creative and ethically attentive strategies for studying the internal workings of state power. Institutional ethnography offers one avenue by focusing on everyday practices, documentary regimes, and administrative routines without requiring direct observation of sensitive operations (Billo and Mountz, 2016; Cuomo, 2021; Heyman, 1995). Other approaches, including reconstructing events and institutional processes through documents, testimonies, and spatial analysis (Valdez et al., 2017; Weizman, 2019), make visible how violence is organized and narrated even when direct access is limited.
Engaging with methodological debates beyond geography is equally important. Anthropologists, political scientists, and sociologists working in authoritarian, conflictual, or highly securitized settings have developed nuanced strategies for navigating secrecy, risk, and asymmetrical power relations (Cronin-Furman and Lake, 2018; Fujii, 2010; Glasius et al., 2018; Sriram, 2011; Turner, 2013). Sustained interdisciplinary dialogue can therefore sharpen research design and deepen ethical reflection when studying institutional power.
Research attentive to the embodied production of state violence can be developed along several interconnected lines. One is to deepen violence-centered embodied inquiry by examining how potential perpetrators justify violent actions morally and institutionally, how officers perceive civilians subjected to violence, and how intersectional identities such as race, gender, class, and ethnicity shape both the enactment of violence and interactions between state agents and targeted populations. Further work could also investigate professional pressures beyond exhaustion or burnout that facilitate violent conduct, as well as differing perceptions and justifications of violence across hierarchical levels within state bureaucracies. The other direction is comparative and decolonial. Responding to calls for decolonizing the geographies of war and violence (C. Jones, 2025), comparative work across diverse national, cultural, and bureaucratic settings can illuminate how colonial legacies, resource disparities, and institutional histories shape the enactment and justification of violence, and can prevent the categories of bureaucracy, security, or professionalism from being silently modeled on a narrow set of Western cases.
In sum, the intervention of this paper is to insist that the geographies of state violence are not only written on the bodies and landscapes it harms, but also composed inside the institutions that make harm administratively ordinary. By tracing how violence is enacted through perception, affect, work regimes, institutional culture, and moral justification, an embodied perspective makes visible the everyday labor that turns coercion into routine. That visibility matters because it changes what becomes researchable: the moments where violence is authorized, the practices that sustain it, and the sites where it might be contested or interrupted.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Carolin Schurr, Nora Komposch, and Betül Aykaç for reading and commenting on earlier drafts of this article and for their encouragement throughout the writing process. I would also like to thank Kevin Grove for his exceptionally thoughtful editorial guidance. His detailed comments and careful articulation of the reviewers’ suggestions were invaluable in helping me strengthen the manuscript. Finally, I am deeply grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive, generous, and intellectually stimulating feedback. Their comments substantially improved the paper and played a crucial role in shaping its final form.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.