Structural Incompatibility as State Violence

Abstract

This meta-paper consolidates and systematizes a series of legal and interdisciplinary works concerned with the relationship between neurodivergence, welfare state structures, the justice system, and state coercive power. Its point of departure is the observation that core legal and administrative structures—particularly in social law, administrative law, and criminal law—implicitly operate on neurotypical assumptions of existence and consequently pathologize, functionalize, or individualize neurodivergent forms of existence.

The text develops the thesis that wherever subsistence-securing benefits, legal recognition, or criminal assessment are coupled to neurotypical standards of reasonableness, adaptation, and performance, a structural incompatibility emerges that has predictably harmful effects on neurodivergent persons. This harm is neither accidental nor a by-product of faulty case-by-case decision-making, but a necessary consequence of the underlying normative architecture of state systems.

On the basis of the consolidated individual papers, a unified analytical and evaluative framework is elaborated: where (1) structural incompatibility between a form of existence and the normative order is present, (2) the resulting harms are foreseeable and known, and (3) existential dependency leaves no realistic option of withdrawal, state action can no longer be qualified as legitimate social or regulatory policy, but must be understood as a form of structural violence. This violence does not manifest primarily as discrete events, but architecturally—through attribution logics, fictions of reasonableness, the individualization of systemic harm, and institutional escalation mechanisms.

The meta-paper demonstrates that classical legal instruments such as proportionality analysis, individualized case correction, or medical assessment systematically fail under these conditions, because they themselves form part of the structure of violence. At the same time, it is shown that an autistic epistemic position—particularly the perception of structural invariances across time, institutions, and fields of law—does not constitute a subjective bias, but rather an analytical resource for identifying institutional violence.

The contribution positions itself as a foundational legal text at the intersection of social law, criminal law, disability law, and human rights. It aims to establish a new legal evaluative standard under conditions of real ontological diversity and to render visible state responsibility where it has hitherto been obscured by individualization, pathologization, and formal assumptions of neutrality.