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Paper short abstract

This paper examines care not as the moral opposite of violence, but as one of its most legitimate and durable forms. Violence is enacted through everyday languages of concern and responsibility, where caring becomes a means of control.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines care not as the ethical opposite of violence, but as one of its most durable and socially legitimate forms. Drawing on long term research on coercion in mental health systems in Southern Europe and ongoing fieldwork on pasung in Indonesia, it analyses how practices framed as protection, treatment, or responsibility systematically enable domination, silencing, and bodily harm. In these settings, violence is rarely articulated as such. It is instead embedded in everyday languages of concern, duty, and benevolence, where to care for someone becomes synonymous with controlling them for their own good.

The analysis combines ethnographic material, institutional documents, and first person accounts to show how care operates as a moral technology that neutralizes contestation. Psychiatric interventions, family mediated confinement, and administrative decisions are justified through appeals to vulnerability, incapacity, or risk, while those subjected to them are progressively deprived of credibility and agency. The paper argues that this configuration produces a specific epistemic asymmetry, in which harm becomes invisible precisely because it is enacted through care.

Methodologically, the paper reflects on the conditions required to study care related violence without reproducing its effects. It addresses the risks faced by researchers working in close proximity to victims, the limits of institutional protection, and the ethical implications of relying on state or medical authorities as interlocutors. By placing care and violence in direct analytical relation, the paper rise awareness of care as a contested social practice whose moral authority demands continuous scrutiny rather than presumption.