Atmospheres of violence: On defenders' intersecting experiences of violence

Defenders experience multiple forms of violence. In this chapter, we briefly review the main categories of violence and discuss how their accumulations and intersections result in a deep sense of insecurity and precarity. Beyond the physical violence of repression, defenders experience structural, cultural, and ecological forms of violence. While much of the media and policy attention is drawn to the most dramatic forms of physical violence, such as killings, many defenders suffer from more insidious and less visible traumas with severe mental health consequences. Marginalization, livelihood and health concerns, surveillance, threats, and assassination attempts can manifest in sleep disorders, anxiety and panic attacks, depression, loneliness, and even suicide. The intersection of multiple forms of violence, experienced over time and space, creates what some defenders have described as ‘a climate of fear’, a sense of being constantly under attack within what we call ‘atmospheres of violence’, assemblages of actors, institutions, logics, processes, and materialities characterized by pervasive and persistent forms of violence. The bodies, cultures, and territories of defenders are, indeed, often being assaulted from different directions, by both visible and invisible actors and processes. Yet despite this constant onslaught, defenders continue to fight to protect their lands and waters, because their fight is more than about them as individuals; it is about the defense of life in the broadest sense.