Causes and cures I: Toward a new definition

• Violence has become a critical topic of discourse in public and academic arenas.
• Violence is a serious issue on which our survival on this planet depends.
• Awareness of violence as a problem is a prerequisite for solving the problem.
• A new definition is proposed to keep up with evolving research.
• A conceptual framework is proposed for organizing knowledge across disciplines.

The past 2 years have been a landmark moment for violence prevention, with the publication of The Global Status Report on Violence Prevention 2014; a historic resolution on violence by the 67th World Health Assembly; and the release of multiple documents on violence by international and United Nations entities, with a corresponding building of momentum in scholarship. Most notably, in September 2015, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, addressing the need for violence prevention at an unprecedented scale. In this context, more than ever, violence studies have become a field of its own right. Still, a systematic approach of the topic has been lacking, and no textbook yet synthesizes the knowledge of multiple disciplines toward a cogent understanding. This article is the first of a series of fifteen articles that will cover, as an example, an outline of the Global Health Studies course entitled, “Violence: Causes and Cures,” reviewing the major bio-psycho-social and structural-environmental perspectives on violence. Until recently, most discourses, academic or public, relied on a very narrow definition of violence, and little consensus existed as to how to properly measure and compare concepts across fields. This article attempts to correct this situation through a new definition and, in so doing, aims to make a pragmatic as well as a theoretical contribution to the relatively new field of violence studies.