Ontological Coexistence and Structural Violence in Law (Studies in World-Formation, Vol. 14)

This volume brings together three contributions that address a shared theoretical and legal question: under what conditions do forms of structural violence toward neurodivergent people arise, and why do these forms of violence frequently remain invisible within modern institutional systems. The point of departure is the observation that contemporary social, legal, and administrative orders implicitly rely on assumptions about a uniform, neurotypical form of human existence. Perception, communication, work capacity, self-regulation, and social interaction are treated as general standards. Forms of existence that structurally diverge from these assumptions tend to appear within this framework either as illness, as individual deficit, or as insufficient adaptation. The contributions develop an ontological and legal-theoretical perspective for analyzing this problem. At the center lies the thesis that many conflicts between neurodivergent persons and institutional systems do not primarily arise from individual difficulties, but from a structural incompatibility between different forms of human existence and the normative architecture of modern societies. This incompatibility produces predictable forms of harm which, within legal and administrative procedures, are often individualized, pathologized, or interpreted as communicative disturbance. The volume unfolds this diagnosis in three interconnected steps. The first contribution introduces the concept of representational violence as an ontological critique of modern knowledge and administrative systems. It argues that, within many institutional contexts, reality is recognized only insofar as it can be translated into symbolic, administrative, or diagnostic formats. Forms of experience, perception, or existence that resist such translation do not merely remain unnoticed; they are structurally excluded from the sphere of what can appear as real. The second contribution develops, on this basis, the concept of a right to ontological coexistence. Neurodivergent forms of human existence are understood not as deviations from a general norm, but as autonomous variants of human world- and meaning-relation. Equality, therefore, cannot be conceived primarily as integration into a single social order. Instead, it must be understood as the legally protected coexistence of different forms of existence without coercion toward normalization, pathologization, or economic functionalization. The third contribution applies this perspective to the analysis of modern state institutions. Drawing on examples from social law, administrative procedures, and criminal-law attribution, it demonstrates how structural incompatibilities between neurodivergent forms of existence and work- and performance-centered systems generate foreseeable harms. Where existential dependency, known incompatibility, and predictable harm converge, state action can no longer be understood as neutral governance but must be recognized as a form of structural violence. Taken together, the volume develops a theoretical framework for analyzing modern societies under conditions of real ontological diversity. By connecting ontological critique, human rights reasoning, and legal system analysis, it aims to make visible forms of institutional violence that remain largely unrecognized in contemporary legal and social orders and to contribute to a reconsideration of equality, responsibility, and protective duties in plural societies.