Procedural Violence: Theorizing Silencing and Resistance by Minoritized Women in National Parliaments

This paper introduces the concept of procedural violence to critically examine how structural inequities and procedural injustices silence minoritized and indigenous women in national parliaments. Drawing on decolonial environmental scholarship, procedural violence is conceptualized as a dynamic interplay between structural violence—manifested through systemic exclusions, epistemic injustices, and intersectional inequalities—and the procedural frameworks of democratic institutions. I argue that minoritised and indigenous women’s voices in parliaments are systematically devalued through institutional and cultural processes of stigmatisation, denigration, and symbolic erasure, all of which are compounded by media coverage of their political work. Such procedural violence manifests in various forms: from direct exclusions and conditional inclusions within political parties, to performative demands on speech, and outright denial of speaking rights in parliaments. The argument is illustrated with cross national examples spanning UK, Denmark and. Key structural violences that underpin procedural violence include discourses of instrumentalization and degradation, hypervisibility and invisibility in media narratives, and policy frameworks that tokenize or undermine intersectional identities. For instance, media portrayals often amplify the scrutiny faced by minoritized women while simultaneously erasing their substantive contributions, exacerbating epistemic injustices. In these settings, the procedural becomes a terrain of struggle, where resistance takes shape not only through formal advocacy but also through symbolic and cultural acts of defiance. The paper argues for a reimagining of democratic spaces, urging scholars and policymakers to consider how procedural violence operates within the broader scaffolding of structural inequities. In doing so, it contributes to ongoing debates on reforming democratic institutions by centering intersectionally marginalised groups.