Positive Peace vs Negative Peace
Why stopping violence is not enough — and why nothing else is possible without it
Negative peace stops direct violence. Positive peace describes the conditions that help a society avoid returning to violence. The distinction matters, but it is not the whole picture: peace exists in concrete situations, relationships, institutions, and the skills of people and communities.
Short Answer
Peace is hardest to talk about precisely when it matters most. During war, the word itself quickly becomes a political argument. Peace is often defined as the absence of war. When war is only a distant headline, that definition can seem too narrow. Under bombardment, however, a ceasefire is not a philosophical half-measure. It means being able to sleep, treat a child, go out for water, and stop wondering whether you will survive the night. Negative peace — the end of direct violence — begins with a simple but indispensable condition: people stay alive.
Yet the silence of the guns does not answer the questions that determine whether violence will return. What made violence politically acceptable? Why did institutions fail to stop it? How did a neighbour become “material,” and revenge become a virtue? Positive peace begins with these questions. It does not mean harmony or universal agreement. It means a society can live through conflict without repeatedly returning to destruction.
Even this distinction is not enough, because it can blur different levels of peace. A ceasefire describes a situation. Trust and recognition describe relationships between people and groups. Rights, participation, and the ability to challenge decisions describe institutions. There is also a human level: can people recognise dehumanisation, examine the conduct of their own side, and help repair what has been damaged? If all of this is compressed into one word, “peace” becomes either too narrow or almost limitless.
Peaceful World therefore uses a working framework. Negative peace sets the lower boundary: direct violence has stopped for everyone, including violence by one’s own institutions. Positive peace describes what helps a society hold that boundary — its relationships, rules, and social capacities. More broadly, peace is the continuing ability of people and institutions to protect life and dignity, navigate conflict without making violence normal, and restore safety after harm has occurred. Peace literacy helps us tell the difference between a system that works and one that merely looks peaceful.
This essay focuses mainly on peace in human societies: the ending of violence, the quality of relationships, institutions, and the skills needed for peaceful life. Ecological, economic, and interspecies dimensions are closely connected to these questions, but they require separate treatment if they are to be addressed seriously.
If you only need the core answer, this section and the FAQ at the end are enough. The rest explains where these ideas came from, where they are useful, why they have been criticised, and how Peaceful World proposes using them today.
Yet the silence of the guns does not answer the questions that determine whether violence will return. What made violence politically acceptable? Why did institutions fail to stop it? How did a neighbour become “material,” and revenge become a virtue? Positive peace begins with these questions. It does not mean harmony or universal agreement. It means a society can live through conflict without repeatedly returning to destruction.
Even this distinction is not enough, because it can blur different levels of peace. A ceasefire describes a situation. Trust and recognition describe relationships between people and groups. Rights, participation, and the ability to challenge decisions describe institutions. There is also a human level: can people recognise dehumanisation, examine the conduct of their own side, and help repair what has been damaged? If all of this is compressed into one word, “peace” becomes either too narrow or almost limitless.
Peaceful World therefore uses a working framework. Negative peace sets the lower boundary: direct violence has stopped for everyone, including violence by one’s own institutions. Positive peace describes what helps a society hold that boundary — its relationships, rules, and social capacities. More broadly, peace is the continuing ability of people and institutions to protect life and dignity, navigate conflict without making violence normal, and restore safety after harm has occurred. Peace literacy helps us tell the difference between a system that works and one that merely looks peaceful.
This essay focuses mainly on peace in human societies: the ending of violence, the quality of relationships, institutions, and the skills needed for peaceful life. Ecological, economic, and interspecies dimensions are closely connected to these questions, but they require separate treatment if they are to be addressed seriously.
If you only need the core answer, this section and the FAQ at the end are enough. The rest explains where these ideas came from, where they are useful, why they have been criticised, and how Peaceful World proposes using them today.
PART I · WHY PEACE NEEDS A DEFINITION
1. Why Peace Needs a Definition
The word “peace” occupies a peculiar place in public life. Almost nobody publicly declares themselves against it, yet different sides use it to mean incompatible things. For some, peace means the end of an attack. For others, it means accepting what has been imposed by force. For still others, it means restoring rights or preserving order. Sometimes “peace” means little more than the moment inconvenient people finally fall silent. Sharing a word does not mean sharing a vision of the future.
Peace can mean an international treaty, inner calm, civic obedience, public safety, harmony, stability, or even victory so complete that an opponent can no longer resist. That richness is useful in poetry but dangerous in politics and education. If a concept comes to mean everything good at once, it stops helping us distinguish between very different social realities.
The problem becomes especially visible in a crisis. A call for peace can be a courageous demand to stop killing. The same word can also be used to pressure a victim: do not resist, do not name the wrongdoer, do not disturb our emotional comfort. Conversely, the language of justice can be used to justify endless violence: until retribution is complete, we cannot stop. In both cases, a noble idea becomes a way of looking past the living person in front of us.
Peace literacy therefore begins not with the slogan “peace is good,” but with precise questions. What violence has stopped? Who is still unprotected, and who is being treated merely as a means in the name of protection? Have the causes of the conflict changed, or does harm continue without gunfire? Can a person challenge power and refuse participation in violence without fear? Does society have ways to correct injustice without destroying human dignity?
A definition will not solve a conflict by itself, but it can stop us mistaking a reassuring label for an actual result. This is one reason peace research moved beyond diplomacy and military history. Scholars had to ask not only why wars begin, but also what prevents them from beginning again.
Peace can mean an international treaty, inner calm, civic obedience, public safety, harmony, stability, or even victory so complete that an opponent can no longer resist. That richness is useful in poetry but dangerous in politics and education. If a concept comes to mean everything good at once, it stops helping us distinguish between very different social realities.
The problem becomes especially visible in a crisis. A call for peace can be a courageous demand to stop killing. The same word can also be used to pressure a victim: do not resist, do not name the wrongdoer, do not disturb our emotional comfort. Conversely, the language of justice can be used to justify endless violence: until retribution is complete, we cannot stop. In both cases, a noble idea becomes a way of looking past the living person in front of us.
Peace literacy therefore begins not with the slogan “peace is good,” but with precise questions. What violence has stopped? Who is still unprotected, and who is being treated merely as a means in the name of protection? Have the causes of the conflict changed, or does harm continue without gunfire? Can a person challenge power and refuse participation in violence without fear? Does society have ways to correct injustice without destroying human dignity?
A definition will not solve a conflict by itself, but it can stop us mistaking a reassuring label for an actual result. This is one reason peace research moved beyond diplomacy and military history. Scholars had to ask not only why wars begin, but also what prevents them from beginning again.
2. Before Galtung: Four Historical Traditions of Peace
The idea that ending war does not automatically create a just shared life long predates modern peace research. Across many traditions, peace has been understood both as an external order and as an inner moral task. Pax could mean security and legal order, but historically it was also tied to the power of the victor. An empire might end wars within its borders not because coercion disappeared, but because coercion became centralised.
Religious traditions added the idea of inner transformation to political order. Shalom and salam meant more than the absence of clashes: wholeness, right relationship, security, and well-being. Ahimsa brought the question of peace into everyday conduct and demanded a discipline of non-harm. Christian traditions of peacemaking linked reconciliation with love of the enemy, although historical churches have often failed to live up to their own moral teachings.
In early modern European political thought, peace was often understood primarily as the containment of violence. After the wars of religion, the strong state was imagined as a machine capable of ending internal war. Yet stability based on fear of the sovereign was not necessarily justice. It could reduce private violence while preserving arbitrary state power.
Immanuel Kant offered a more institutional view in Perpetual Peace. Durable peace, in his account, does not arise from a single treaty or the goodwill of rulers. It requires republican government, a legal federation of states, and norms of hospitality. The shift matters: peace stops being the interval between wars and becomes a political project that must be embedded in institutions. [1]
After two world wars, this logic entered the architecture of the United Nations. The UN Charter opens with a determination to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war and immediately links that purpose to human rights, international law, social progress, and larger freedom. Peace is no longer treated only as the restraint of armed force, but as the outcome of a broader system of relations. [2]
UNESCO’s Constitution added another influential idea: since wars begin in human minds, the defences of peace must also be built there. There is a danger in reducing the causes of war to psychology, as if wars were produced only by mistaken beliefs rather than interests, institutions, and material power. Yet the strength of the formula is clear. International agreements do not remove the educational task. People must learn how to live within new institutions, or old habits will quickly take them over. [3]
It is better to see this history not as a straight staircase toward modern theory, but as four traditions that still argue with one another. The first treats peace as order: violence ends because authority becomes strong enough to monopolise force. The second treats peace as law: stability depends on rules, mutual obligations, and limits on arbitrary power. The third sees peace as a quality of relationship — wholeness, recognition, trust, hospitality, and the ability to live together. The fourth treats peace as a personal practice: self-discipline, non-harm, refusal of revenge, and work with fear.
These traditions cannot be translated perfectly into one another. Pax, shalom, salam, shanti, and ahimsa belong to different linguistic, religious, and political worlds. Comparing them can deepen the concept of peace, but it can also create a polished diagram that smooths over the internal debates within each tradition. Galtung himself compared civilisational understandings of peace and contrasted external and internal models. Today that map is best read as a historically important hypothesis, not as a final description of cultures. [32]
For peace literacy, the practical conclusion is simple: no strong state, treaty, healthy relationship, or personal ethic creates peace on its own. Each tradition captures a real part of the problem and becomes misleading when it mistakes that part for the whole. Order without law easily becomes repression. Law without living relationships becomes formalism. Relationships without institutions are powerless against organised violence. Personal ethics without social architecture demand heroism where rules should have done the work.
Religious traditions added the idea of inner transformation to political order. Shalom and salam meant more than the absence of clashes: wholeness, right relationship, security, and well-being. Ahimsa brought the question of peace into everyday conduct and demanded a discipline of non-harm. Christian traditions of peacemaking linked reconciliation with love of the enemy, although historical churches have often failed to live up to their own moral teachings.
In early modern European political thought, peace was often understood primarily as the containment of violence. After the wars of religion, the strong state was imagined as a machine capable of ending internal war. Yet stability based on fear of the sovereign was not necessarily justice. It could reduce private violence while preserving arbitrary state power.
Immanuel Kant offered a more institutional view in Perpetual Peace. Durable peace, in his account, does not arise from a single treaty or the goodwill of rulers. It requires republican government, a legal federation of states, and norms of hospitality. The shift matters: peace stops being the interval between wars and becomes a political project that must be embedded in institutions. [1]
After two world wars, this logic entered the architecture of the United Nations. The UN Charter opens with a determination to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war and immediately links that purpose to human rights, international law, social progress, and larger freedom. Peace is no longer treated only as the restraint of armed force, but as the outcome of a broader system of relations. [2]
UNESCO’s Constitution added another influential idea: since wars begin in human minds, the defences of peace must also be built there. There is a danger in reducing the causes of war to psychology, as if wars were produced only by mistaken beliefs rather than interests, institutions, and material power. Yet the strength of the formula is clear. International agreements do not remove the educational task. People must learn how to live within new institutions, or old habits will quickly take them over. [3]
It is better to see this history not as a straight staircase toward modern theory, but as four traditions that still argue with one another. The first treats peace as order: violence ends because authority becomes strong enough to monopolise force. The second treats peace as law: stability depends on rules, mutual obligations, and limits on arbitrary power. The third sees peace as a quality of relationship — wholeness, recognition, trust, hospitality, and the ability to live together. The fourth treats peace as a personal practice: self-discipline, non-harm, refusal of revenge, and work with fear.
These traditions cannot be translated perfectly into one another. Pax, shalom, salam, shanti, and ahimsa belong to different linguistic, religious, and political worlds. Comparing them can deepen the concept of peace, but it can also create a polished diagram that smooths over the internal debates within each tradition. Galtung himself compared civilisational understandings of peace and contrasted external and internal models. Today that map is best read as a historically important hypothesis, not as a final description of cultures. [32]
For peace literacy, the practical conclusion is simple: no strong state, treaty, healthy relationship, or personal ethic creates peace on its own. Each tradition captures a real part of the problem and becomes misleading when it mistakes that part for the whole. Order without law easily becomes repression. Law without living relationships becomes formalism. Relationships without institutions are powerless against organised violence. Personal ethics without social architecture demand heroism where rules should have done the work.
PART II · GALTUNG AND THE BIRTH OF MODERN PEACE RESEARCH
3. The Birth of Peace Research
After 1945, war became too dangerous to remain the concern of military strategists alone. Nuclear weapons cast doubt on the very idea of victory: even a “successful” use of force could destroy the conditions that force was supposedly meant to protect. At the same time, decolonisation, civil-rights movements, and research on poverty raised questions about forms of harm that did not necessarily look like battle.
During the 1950s and 1960s, peace and conflict research emerged as a distinct field. Its purpose was not to celebrate the “right” side, but to study systematically the causes of war, mechanisms of escalation, possibilities for mediation, and conditions of durable peace. A research section founded in Oslo in 1959 later became the Peace Research Institute Oslo; the Journal of Peace Research began publication in 1964. One of the central figures in this new field was the Norwegian sociologist and mathematician Johan Galtung. [4]
Galtung was dissatisfied with a field in which war was studied in detail while peace was defined by subtraction: if war was absent, peace must be present. Military thought had a rich vocabulary of strategy, logistics, deterrence, mobilisation, and victory. Peace remained the word for a situation in which apparently nothing happened. Galtung tried to give peace a theory of its own. Later scholars developed the same move: peace cannot be studied only as the reverse side of war. [22, 34]
In his early work, Galtung distinguished negative peace from positive peace. His 1969 article “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research” gave the distinction its best-known formulation. Negative peace was linked to the absence of personal or direct violence; positive peace to the absence of structural violence and to social justice. The object of study changed accordingly: researchers had to look not only at the battlefield, but at the organisation of society. [5]
Galtung later added a cultural dimension. Direct violence causes immediate harm; social structures can make some people more vulnerable than others; culture can then make that arrangement appear natural, necessary, or morally right. Violence acquires a language of justification and can be reframed as duty, defence, tradition, scientific necessity, or sacred obligation. [6]
This framework gave peace a positive content of its own, but its breadth soon became a problem. If every barrier to human development counts as violence, and positive peace means removing all such barriers, peace research risks becoming a theory of everything good. The field has been balancing ever since between two extremes: peace that is too narrow because it means only the absence of gunfire, and peace that is too broad because it becomes a synonym for the perfect society.
That tension produced an internal debate. Some researchers argued that a rigorous science should focus first on wars, killings, and the conditions under which they end. Others replied that if the field studied only violence, peace would once again collapse into the absence of war. Later reviews of the Journal of Peace Research show that negative peace has always occupied a central place, while the broader programme of positive peace has expanded and contracted under pressure for precise, testable indicators. [14]
During the 1950s and 1960s, peace and conflict research emerged as a distinct field. Its purpose was not to celebrate the “right” side, but to study systematically the causes of war, mechanisms of escalation, possibilities for mediation, and conditions of durable peace. A research section founded in Oslo in 1959 later became the Peace Research Institute Oslo; the Journal of Peace Research began publication in 1964. One of the central figures in this new field was the Norwegian sociologist and mathematician Johan Galtung. [4]
Galtung was dissatisfied with a field in which war was studied in detail while peace was defined by subtraction: if war was absent, peace must be present. Military thought had a rich vocabulary of strategy, logistics, deterrence, mobilisation, and victory. Peace remained the word for a situation in which apparently nothing happened. Galtung tried to give peace a theory of its own. Later scholars developed the same move: peace cannot be studied only as the reverse side of war. [22, 34]
In his early work, Galtung distinguished negative peace from positive peace. His 1969 article “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research” gave the distinction its best-known formulation. Negative peace was linked to the absence of personal or direct violence; positive peace to the absence of structural violence and to social justice. The object of study changed accordingly: researchers had to look not only at the battlefield, but at the organisation of society. [5]
Galtung later added a cultural dimension. Direct violence causes immediate harm; social structures can make some people more vulnerable than others; culture can then make that arrangement appear natural, necessary, or morally right. Violence acquires a language of justification and can be reframed as duty, defence, tradition, scientific necessity, or sacred obligation. [6]
This framework gave peace a positive content of its own, but its breadth soon became a problem. If every barrier to human development counts as violence, and positive peace means removing all such barriers, peace research risks becoming a theory of everything good. The field has been balancing ever since between two extremes: peace that is too narrow because it means only the absence of gunfire, and peace that is too broad because it becomes a synonym for the perfect society.
That tension produced an internal debate. Some researchers argued that a rigorous science should focus first on wars, killings, and the conditions under which they end. Others replied that if the field studied only violence, peace would once again collapse into the absence of war. Later reviews of the Journal of Peace Research show that negative peace has always occupied a central place, while the broader programme of positive peace has expanded and contracted under pressure for precise, testable indicators. [14]
4. Johan Galtung: Positive Peace, Negative Peace, and Systems of Violence
Popular introductions often present positive peace and negative peace as two types of peace, then reduce Galtung’s theory to a single formula: negative peace is the absence of war; positive peace is the presence of justice. The history is more complicated. In the editorial that opened the first issue of the Journal of Peace Research in 1964, positive peace was associated primarily with the integration of human society. By 1969, the centre of gravity had shifted toward structural violence: harm could be generated by the organisation of social relations even when there was no immediate attacker. In 1990, Galtung introduced the idea of cultural violence — symbolic forms that make direct and structural harm legitimate or acceptable. [5, 6, 35]
His first move was to refuse to treat peace as the leftover space after war had been subtracted. His second was to ask what kinds of relationships, institutions, and ideas make a society peaceful. That second move carried his work far beyond the study of armed conflict, influencing public health, development studies, education, law, and critical social theory.
These stages, however, do not form one perfectly coherent system. “Integration,” “social justice,” “absence of structural violence,” and the contemporary language of “attitudes, institutions and structures” are related, but they are not identical. Positive peace is therefore better understood as a family of related ideas whose meaning needs to be specified in each study, not as one fixed formula settled for all time.
His first move was to refuse to treat peace as the leftover space after war had been subtracted. His second was to ask what kinds of relationships, institutions, and ideas make a society peaceful. That second move carried his work far beyond the study of armed conflict, influencing public health, development studies, education, law, and critical social theory.
These stages, however, do not form one perfectly coherent system. “Integration,” “social justice,” “absence of structural violence,” and the contemporary language of “attitudes, institutions and structures” are related, but they are not identical. Positive peace is therefore better understood as a family of related ideas whose meaning needs to be specified in each study, not as one fixed formula settled for all time.
5. Negative Peace: Is Stopping Violence Enough?
The word “negative” is not a moral judgment. It means that peace is defined by an absence: no war, killing, torture, attack, shelling, abduction, or other direct violence. In Galtung’s early terminology, personal violence included psychological as well as physical harm. In this essay, minimum peace refers primarily to the ending of organised direct violence: people should not be killed, physically injured, or forced to live under an immediate threat of physical violence.
In international politics, negative peace can take the form of a ceasefire, separation of forces, arms control, a peacekeeping operation, a non-aggression agreement, or the restoration of basic security. Within a society it can mean ending mass repression, disarming armed groups, protecting civilians, and placing the use of force under law, human rights, and independent oversight rather than private revenge or arbitrary state power.
The narrowness of this definition is both its weakness and its strength. It says nothing about the quality of schools, the distribution of resources, corruption, historical memory, or social justice. But it helps keep the immediate task in view. When people are dying, the first practical duty is to stop the dying. Peacemaking that begins with elaborate explanations of causes but cannot protect a living person risks turning analytical depth into moral evasion.
Negative peace can be maintained in very different ways, and those ways are not morally equivalent. It may rest on mutual trust, functioning law, and political agreement. It may also rest on fear, occupation, dictatorship, or a balance of mutual destruction. The shooting has stopped in both cases, but the quality and durability of those conditions are radically different.
So when we assess negative peace, we need to ask several questions. Has violence stopped for everyone, or merely disappeared from public view? Have the parties renounced it, or have they temporarily lost the ability to continue? Are there mechanisms of oversight and protection? Can disputes be resolved without returning to weapons? Who pays the price for calm?
Negative peace gives people time. Its moral value is enormous precisely because a living person receives that time. But the pause can be used to rebuild institutions and trust — or to rearm, intensify propaganda, and prepare the next round of war. This is where the question of positive peace begins.
In international politics, negative peace can take the form of a ceasefire, separation of forces, arms control, a peacekeeping operation, a non-aggression agreement, or the restoration of basic security. Within a society it can mean ending mass repression, disarming armed groups, protecting civilians, and placing the use of force under law, human rights, and independent oversight rather than private revenge or arbitrary state power.
The narrowness of this definition is both its weakness and its strength. It says nothing about the quality of schools, the distribution of resources, corruption, historical memory, or social justice. But it helps keep the immediate task in view. When people are dying, the first practical duty is to stop the dying. Peacemaking that begins with elaborate explanations of causes but cannot protect a living person risks turning analytical depth into moral evasion.
Negative peace can be maintained in very different ways, and those ways are not morally equivalent. It may rest on mutual trust, functioning law, and political agreement. It may also rest on fear, occupation, dictatorship, or a balance of mutual destruction. The shooting has stopped in both cases, but the quality and durability of those conditions are radically different.
So when we assess negative peace, we need to ask several questions. Has violence stopped for everyone, or merely disappeared from public view? Have the parties renounced it, or have they temporarily lost the ability to continue? Are there mechanisms of oversight and protection? Can disputes be resolved without returning to weapons? Who pays the price for calm?
Negative peace gives people time. Its moral value is enormous precisely because a living person receives that time. But the pause can be used to rebuild institutions and trust — or to rearm, intensify propaganda, and prepare the next round of war. This is where the question of positive peace begins.
6. Positive Peace: What Makes Peace Last?
Positive peace does not mean permanent friendliness, the disappearance of conflict, or universal agreement with the government of the day. It refers to relationships, institutions, and cultural norms that allow a society to live through inevitable disagreements without making humiliation and destruction its normal way of resolving them.
For Galtung, positive peace was closely connected to social justice and the absence of structural violence. Some organisations today translate the concept into measurable conditions. The Institute for Economics & Peace defines Positive Peace as the attitudes, institutions and structures that create and sustain peaceful societies. Its framework includes well-functioning government, equitable distribution of resources, free flow of information, good relations with neighbours, high levels of human capital, acceptance of the rights of others, low levels of corruption, and a sound business environment. [7]
That approach is useful for measurement because it turns an abstract idea into observable indicators. At the same time, it embodies a particular picture of a good society. A sound business environment may support stability, for example, but it does not by itself define peace. An index identifies statistically associated conditions; it does not reveal a philosophical truth written into nature.
Justice remains a moral core of positive peace: lasting peace cannot be built on systematic humiliation, denial of rights, or the treatment of people as instruments. Yet the word “justice” alone is not enough for analysis. We need to ask what a society can actually do. Can it keep conflict within the rule of law, limit power, protect people, and repair harm? If it can, peace has a better chance of surviving the next crisis. If it cannot, even impressive institutions may turn out to be scenery.
Durability depends on several elements. Law must restrain arbitrary power and remain accessible to those with less power. People need a real ability to influence decisions and challenge them. Society should not leave entire groups in chronic vulnerability, and the information environment should not leave people defenceless against propaganda. Education should help people recognise escalation, collective revenge, and moral exclusion. None of these elements works on its own.
Positive peace does not remove the need to protect a person immediately from an attack. But a real threat does not automatically justify every measure described as “defence.” Force can be considered only as an extreme exception, when the threat is established, less harmful options have been exhausted, the response is proportionate, responsibility is individualised, and actions are accountable. The same standard applies when a state coerces its own citizens: a society cannot be saved by turning a person into an instrument of its salvation. Security built without law, education, and accountability can eventually reproduce the very threat it was expanded to resist.
Positive peace therefore cannot be exported as a ready-made package of liberal institutions, nor can it remain a beautiful aspiration. It has to be tested against a person’s real options: can they protect life, challenge harm, participate in decisions, and be heard without resorting to organised violence?
For Galtung, positive peace was closely connected to social justice and the absence of structural violence. Some organisations today translate the concept into measurable conditions. The Institute for Economics & Peace defines Positive Peace as the attitudes, institutions and structures that create and sustain peaceful societies. Its framework includes well-functioning government, equitable distribution of resources, free flow of information, good relations with neighbours, high levels of human capital, acceptance of the rights of others, low levels of corruption, and a sound business environment. [7]
That approach is useful for measurement because it turns an abstract idea into observable indicators. At the same time, it embodies a particular picture of a good society. A sound business environment may support stability, for example, but it does not by itself define peace. An index identifies statistically associated conditions; it does not reveal a philosophical truth written into nature.
Justice remains a moral core of positive peace: lasting peace cannot be built on systematic humiliation, denial of rights, or the treatment of people as instruments. Yet the word “justice” alone is not enough for analysis. We need to ask what a society can actually do. Can it keep conflict within the rule of law, limit power, protect people, and repair harm? If it can, peace has a better chance of surviving the next crisis. If it cannot, even impressive institutions may turn out to be scenery.
Durability depends on several elements. Law must restrain arbitrary power and remain accessible to those with less power. People need a real ability to influence decisions and challenge them. Society should not leave entire groups in chronic vulnerability, and the information environment should not leave people defenceless against propaganda. Education should help people recognise escalation, collective revenge, and moral exclusion. None of these elements works on its own.
Positive peace does not remove the need to protect a person immediately from an attack. But a real threat does not automatically justify every measure described as “defence.” Force can be considered only as an extreme exception, when the threat is established, less harmful options have been exhausted, the response is proportionate, responsibility is individualised, and actions are accountable. The same standard applies when a state coerces its own citizens: a society cannot be saved by turning a person into an instrument of its salvation. Security built without law, education, and accountability can eventually reproduce the very threat it was expanded to resist.
Positive peace therefore cannot be exported as a ready-made package of liberal institutions, nor can it remain a beautiful aspiration. It has to be tested against a person’s real options: can they protect life, challenge harm, participate in decisions, and be heard without resorting to organised violence?
7. Three Layers of Violence: Direct, Structural, and Cultural
One of the best-known parts of Galtung’s legacy is the distinction between direct, structural, and cultural violence. The model is often represented as a triangle or an iceberg. Direct violence is visible at the surface; beneath it lie relationships and meanings that can make direct harm more likely and more acceptable.
7.1. Direct Violence
Direct violence usually has a concrete event, an actor, and an immediate victim. It includes killing, torture, beating, rape, abduction, bombardment, physical threats, and forced displacement. It is easier to document legally and statistically because time, place, consequences, and often responsibility can be identified.
Even here, however, language is contested. A state may call an action defence while an opponent calls it aggression. An armed group may call an act resistance while the victim calls it terror. The fact of harm therefore needs to be separated from the label participants give it. The moral assessment of an act should not depend only on whether it was committed “in our name.”
7.2. Structural Violence
Structural violence describes persistent and preventable harm that arises not as a single attack but as a normal, predictable outcome of how a system is organised. A person may repeatedly be denied medical care, safety, legal protection, or political voice not because one identifiable villain decided to hurt them, but because institutions predictably distribute risk and opportunity unequally. [5]
The concept has been especially influential in research on public health, poverty, and discrimination. It helped show that the absence of an obvious perpetrator does not mean the absence of a causal mechanism. A system can generate suffering without a single command centre where someone signs an order saying, “cause suffering.” [21]
But the concept needs discipline. Not every inequality is violence, not every institutional failure is equivalent to an attack, and an unequal outcome does not by itself prove intent or a single cause. If everything that limits human opportunity is called violence, the term loses its ability to distinguish among mechanisms and becomes a general expression of moral disapproval.
7.3. Cultural Violence
Cultural violence does not mean “bad culture,” nor is it an accusation against an entire people. Galtung used the term for aspects of religion, ideology, language, art, science, and symbolic life that can legitimise direct or structural violence. Culture does not necessarily strike the blow. It can explain why a blow is seen as right, inevitable, or not worth seeing. [6]
Cultural justification works through phrases that change moral perception: “they only understand force,” “they chose their fate,” “some people will have to be sacrificed for the future,” “they are not people but material,” “our violence is defence, their defence is a crime.” The more often such formulas are repeated, the less inner resistance is needed before direct harm becomes thinkable.
Culture, however, is not computer code that automatically determines behaviour. The same religious texts, historical myths, and national symbols can be used for war or for reconciliation. Analysis must therefore show the actual mechanism of justification: who interprets the symbol, in what institutional setting, for which audience, and with what consequences.
7.1. Direct Violence
Direct violence usually has a concrete event, an actor, and an immediate victim. It includes killing, torture, beating, rape, abduction, bombardment, physical threats, and forced displacement. It is easier to document legally and statistically because time, place, consequences, and often responsibility can be identified.
Even here, however, language is contested. A state may call an action defence while an opponent calls it aggression. An armed group may call an act resistance while the victim calls it terror. The fact of harm therefore needs to be separated from the label participants give it. The moral assessment of an act should not depend only on whether it was committed “in our name.”
7.2. Structural Violence
Structural violence describes persistent and preventable harm that arises not as a single attack but as a normal, predictable outcome of how a system is organised. A person may repeatedly be denied medical care, safety, legal protection, or political voice not because one identifiable villain decided to hurt them, but because institutions predictably distribute risk and opportunity unequally. [5]
The concept has been especially influential in research on public health, poverty, and discrimination. It helped show that the absence of an obvious perpetrator does not mean the absence of a causal mechanism. A system can generate suffering without a single command centre where someone signs an order saying, “cause suffering.” [21]
But the concept needs discipline. Not every inequality is violence, not every institutional failure is equivalent to an attack, and an unequal outcome does not by itself prove intent or a single cause. If everything that limits human opportunity is called violence, the term loses its ability to distinguish among mechanisms and becomes a general expression of moral disapproval.
7.3. Cultural Violence
Cultural violence does not mean “bad culture,” nor is it an accusation against an entire people. Galtung used the term for aspects of religion, ideology, language, art, science, and symbolic life that can legitimise direct or structural violence. Culture does not necessarily strike the blow. It can explain why a blow is seen as right, inevitable, or not worth seeing. [6]
Cultural justification works through phrases that change moral perception: “they only understand force,” “they chose their fate,” “some people will have to be sacrificed for the future,” “they are not people but material,” “our violence is defence, their defence is a crime.” The more often such formulas are repeated, the less inner resistance is needed before direct harm becomes thinkable.
Culture, however, is not computer code that automatically determines behaviour. The same religious texts, historical myths, and national symbols can be used for war or for reconciliation. Analysis must therefore show the actual mechanism of justification: who interprets the symbol, in what institutional setting, for which audience, and with what consequences.
PART III · THE USES AND LIMITS OF POSITIVE PEACE
8. Conflict, Resistance, and Peace
Public discussion often treats conflict and violence as if they were the same thing. Conflict arises when needs, interests, values, memories, or ideas of justice are incompatible. It is a normal part of shared life. Violence is one way of responding to conflict, but it is not the same thing as conflict itself.
A society without conflict is possible only under two conditions: either everyone becomes the same, or some people lose the right to express their differences. The first is impossible; the second is repression. An outwardly calm system can therefore be deeply unpeaceful. The conflict has not disappeared; it has been pushed out of language, courts, politics, and public memory.
Positive peace does not eliminate disagreement. It expands the ways people can express disagreement and pursue change. Elections, courts, strikes, trade unions, investigations, journalism, public campaigns, mediation, and civil disobedience can keep conflict from turning into destruction.
From this perspective, protest is not necessarily a threat to peace. Sometimes it is evidence that peaceful institutions are still alive. Conversely, “stability” maintained by fear of punishment may conceal and accumulate more dangerous tensions. Silence does not heal a contradiction when people have no right to speak.
The distinction between conflict and violence matters in education as well. Children are often taught that a good person does not get angry, argue, or refuse. That model produces not peace but helplessness or hidden aggression. Peace literacy should teach people to set boundaries, name harm, protect someone weaker, and live with disagreement without humiliating the other person.
Conflict can destroy, but it can also expose hidden injustice and become the beginning of change. The task is not to erase differences but to change the form of struggle. John Paul Lederach described this as conflict transformation: attention moves beyond the immediate episode to the relationships, structures, and cultural patterns that the conflict brings into view. [8]
This leads to another limit: peace is not moderation at any cost. Nonviolent conflict can be sharp, large-scale, and inconvenient. It can disrupt familiar routines, impose economic costs, and force a society to look at what it preferred not to see. It should be judged not by the comfort of observers but by its relationship to life, dignity, rights, and the means chosen. Means are not neutral. The methods a movement uses to pursue change are already shaping the future order. Peaceful World’s principle, “Peace by peaceful means,” means that present practice should already embody the qualities of the society we want to build. [20]
A society without conflict is possible only under two conditions: either everyone becomes the same, or some people lose the right to express their differences. The first is impossible; the second is repression. An outwardly calm system can therefore be deeply unpeaceful. The conflict has not disappeared; it has been pushed out of language, courts, politics, and public memory.
Positive peace does not eliminate disagreement. It expands the ways people can express disagreement and pursue change. Elections, courts, strikes, trade unions, investigations, journalism, public campaigns, mediation, and civil disobedience can keep conflict from turning into destruction.
From this perspective, protest is not necessarily a threat to peace. Sometimes it is evidence that peaceful institutions are still alive. Conversely, “stability” maintained by fear of punishment may conceal and accumulate more dangerous tensions. Silence does not heal a contradiction when people have no right to speak.
The distinction between conflict and violence matters in education as well. Children are often taught that a good person does not get angry, argue, or refuse. That model produces not peace but helplessness or hidden aggression. Peace literacy should teach people to set boundaries, name harm, protect someone weaker, and live with disagreement without humiliating the other person.
Conflict can destroy, but it can also expose hidden injustice and become the beginning of change. The task is not to erase differences but to change the form of struggle. John Paul Lederach described this as conflict transformation: attention moves beyond the immediate episode to the relationships, structures, and cultural patterns that the conflict brings into view. [8]
This leads to another limit: peace is not moderation at any cost. Nonviolent conflict can be sharp, large-scale, and inconvenient. It can disrupt familiar routines, impose economic costs, and force a society to look at what it preferred not to see. It should be judged not by the comfort of observers but by its relationship to life, dignity, rights, and the means chosen. Means are not neutral. The methods a movement uses to pursue change are already shaping the future order. Peaceful World’s principle, “Peace by peaceful means,” means that present practice should already embody the qualities of the society we want to build. [20]
9. Where Peace Exists: Situations, Relationships, Institutions, and Human Skills
Much of the confusion around peace comes from using one word for different levels. A state may not be at war while some people inside it live under constant threat. Two states may formally be at peace while remaining enemies prepared for confrontation. Within an armed conflict, by contrast, pockets of cooperation can survive. A school may teach human rights while reproducing humiliation through its everyday discipline.
Before measuring peace, we need to know which level we mean. Are we talking about a situation, such as the end of a particular episode of violence? About relationships, where recognition, trust, and freedom from domination matter? About institutions and the reliability of law? Or about people and communities — their knowledge, habits, and moral resilience? Research on relational peace asks us to look not only at territories but at how actors behave toward one another, whether they recognise one another, whether they trust one another, and how they understand the relationship itself. [23]
These levels often move at different speeds. Relations among political elites may become peaceful before relations among communities do. Institutions may exist on paper without earning trust. People may have strong dialogue skills while living inside a repressive system. The reverse can also happen: good rules can collapse because a society has not learned to apply them consistently to “us” and “them.”
This essay uses four levels of analysis. The situational level asks whether immediate harm has stopped. The relational level looks at the quality of interaction and mutual recognition. The institutional level asks whether people have reliable ways to resist private, group, and state coercion, take part in decisions, and resolve disputes. The human level asks whether people can recognise escalation and choose actions that do not multiply harm. This framework does not replace the distinction between negative and positive peace; it explains why that pair of terms is often not enough for a precise diagnosis.
Four Levels at a Glance
• Situation. Main question: Has immediate harm stopped? Signs include the absence of fighting, killing, torture, and attacks. A common mistake is to treat a temporary pause as completed peace.
• Relationships. Main question: How do the parties see and treat one another? Signs include recognition, trust, cooperation, and the absence of domination. A common mistake is to assume that a formal agreement has already changed the relationship.
• Institutions. Main question: Can people protect rights and resolve disputes without weapons? Signs include functioning law, participation, negotiation, and independent ways to settle disputes. A common mistake is to treat the existence of rules as proof that they work.
• Skills and attitudes. Main question: What can people and communities actually do? Signs include recognising dehumanisation, exercising self-restraint, and participating in repair. A common mistake is to infer real skills from the number of lessons, publications, or training sessions delivered.
Before measuring peace, we need to know which level we mean. Are we talking about a situation, such as the end of a particular episode of violence? About relationships, where recognition, trust, and freedom from domination matter? About institutions and the reliability of law? Or about people and communities — their knowledge, habits, and moral resilience? Research on relational peace asks us to look not only at territories but at how actors behave toward one another, whether they recognise one another, whether they trust one another, and how they understand the relationship itself. [23]
These levels often move at different speeds. Relations among political elites may become peaceful before relations among communities do. Institutions may exist on paper without earning trust. People may have strong dialogue skills while living inside a repressive system. The reverse can also happen: good rules can collapse because a society has not learned to apply them consistently to “us” and “them.”
This essay uses four levels of analysis. The situational level asks whether immediate harm has stopped. The relational level looks at the quality of interaction and mutual recognition. The institutional level asks whether people have reliable ways to resist private, group, and state coercion, take part in decisions, and resolve disputes. The human level asks whether people can recognise escalation and choose actions that do not multiply harm. This framework does not replace the distinction between negative and positive peace; it explains why that pair of terms is often not enough for a precise diagnosis.
Four Levels at a Glance
• Situation. Main question: Has immediate harm stopped? Signs include the absence of fighting, killing, torture, and attacks. A common mistake is to treat a temporary pause as completed peace.
• Relationships. Main question: How do the parties see and treat one another? Signs include recognition, trust, cooperation, and the absence of domination. A common mistake is to assume that a formal agreement has already changed the relationship.
• Institutions. Main question: Can people protect rights and resolve disputes without weapons? Signs include functioning law, participation, negotiation, and independent ways to settle disputes. A common mistake is to treat the existence of rules as proof that they work.
• Skills and attitudes. Main question: What can people and communities actually do? Signs include recognising dehumanisation, exercising self-restraint, and participating in repair. A common mistake is to infer real skills from the number of lessons, publications, or training sessions delivered.
10. From Ceasefire to Durable Peace
The movement from negative peace to positive peace is not linear and cannot be divided into neat stages. A society cannot first “finish” security and only then turn to justice, memory, and education. These processes happen at the same time and affect one another. Political participation can help preserve a ceasefire. Unresolved responsibility can destroy trust. Demanding reconciliation too early can itself be experienced as another form of violence.
The UN Secretary-General’s 1992 report An Agenda for Peace distinguished preventive diplomacy, peacemaking, peacekeeping, and post-conflict peacebuilding. The importance of the report was not only terminological. It described peace not as one signed document but as a connected set of tasks: prevention, stopping violence, sustaining the result, and rebuilding after harm. [9]
The 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement shows how such a transition can be embedded in institutions. It did more than reduce violence. It introduced new political structures, a principle of consent, cooperation across jurisdictions, and commitments to rights and equality. The agreement did not erase identities or historical disagreements; it created an architecture within which those disagreements could be expressed without returning to the previous level of violence. [10]
No agreement, however, can erase trauma and social inequality by itself. A signed text can change rules but cannot instantly change memory, family histories, spatial segregation, or habits of distrust. Peace requires continuing work with institutions. They need political will, resources, education, and the capacity to recognise and correct new failures.
The UN–World Bank study Pathways for Peace emphasised broad participation, early prevention, and institutions able to manage risks before conflict turns into mass violence. One of its important conclusions was that prevention is not a separate sector or a one-off project. It depends on how a society distributes power, resources, security, and the ability to be heard. [11]
Durable peace cannot be built with one universal tool. Security without law can become repression. Law that people cannot access remains an empty text. Dialogue without accountability can become a demand to forget. Memory without a vision of a shared future can become a school of inherited revenge. Education without institutional change teaches words that everyday life contradicts.
In 2016, the UN General Assembly and Security Council formalised the idea of sustaining peace as a continuing task: preventing the outbreak, escalation, continuation, and recurrence of conflict, addressing root causes, helping recovery, and supporting development. The key point is not the phrase itself, but the rejection of a model in which peace begins only after war and ends when a project closes. [28]
The 2023 New Agenda for Peace again links prevention with international law, trust, inequality, digital technologies, climate risks, and reducing the human cost of weapons. The agenda broadens the field, but the wider the concept of peace becomes, the more important it is to distinguish levels of analysis, responsible actors, and mechanisms that can actually be tested. [29]
The UN Secretary-General’s 1992 report An Agenda for Peace distinguished preventive diplomacy, peacemaking, peacekeeping, and post-conflict peacebuilding. The importance of the report was not only terminological. It described peace not as one signed document but as a connected set of tasks: prevention, stopping violence, sustaining the result, and rebuilding after harm. [9]
The 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement shows how such a transition can be embedded in institutions. It did more than reduce violence. It introduced new political structures, a principle of consent, cooperation across jurisdictions, and commitments to rights and equality. The agreement did not erase identities or historical disagreements; it created an architecture within which those disagreements could be expressed without returning to the previous level of violence. [10]
No agreement, however, can erase trauma and social inequality by itself. A signed text can change rules but cannot instantly change memory, family histories, spatial segregation, or habits of distrust. Peace requires continuing work with institutions. They need political will, resources, education, and the capacity to recognise and correct new failures.
The UN–World Bank study Pathways for Peace emphasised broad participation, early prevention, and institutions able to manage risks before conflict turns into mass violence. One of its important conclusions was that prevention is not a separate sector or a one-off project. It depends on how a society distributes power, resources, security, and the ability to be heard. [11]
Durable peace cannot be built with one universal tool. Security without law can become repression. Law that people cannot access remains an empty text. Dialogue without accountability can become a demand to forget. Memory without a vision of a shared future can become a school of inherited revenge. Education without institutional change teaches words that everyday life contradicts.
In 2016, the UN General Assembly and Security Council formalised the idea of sustaining peace as a continuing task: preventing the outbreak, escalation, continuation, and recurrence of conflict, addressing root causes, helping recovery, and supporting development. The key point is not the phrase itself, but the rejection of a model in which peace begins only after war and ends when a project closes. [28]
The 2023 New Agenda for Peace again links prevention with international law, trust, inequality, digital technologies, climate risks, and reducing the human cost of weapons. The agenda broadens the field, but the wider the concept of peace becomes, the more important it is to distinguish levels of analysis, responsible actors, and mechanisms that can actually be tested. [29]
11. Why Positive Peace Should Not Become a Utopia
Positive peace also loses meaning at the opposite extreme — when it becomes the name for a world without inequality, suffering, alienation, or conflict of any kind. At that point it is no longer an analytical concept but another name for the perfect society. The boundary disappears, almost any existing order can be labelled violent, and radical transformation can appear justified in advance.
The problem is not that the aspiration to justice has gone too far. The problem is that distinctions disappear. If one term describes killing, discrimination, poor policy, institutional clumsiness, and ordinary human limitation in the same way, it stops helping us think. Moral intensity rises while analytical precision falls.
There is also a quieter danger. Power can decide for itself which relationships count as harmonious, which values are mature, and which behaviour is “peaceful.” The dissenter then becomes an obstacle to peace, and peace education becomes a discipline of obedience.
The right to conflict and criticism therefore belongs inside any serious understanding of positive peace. No state, international organisation, or Peaceful World can declare its own image of the “peaceful person” final. We can propose definitions and practices, but we should keep them open to testing, cultural dialogue, and revision.
What matters here is not the size of the promise but the mechanism. How exactly does an institution produce preventable harm? Who bears the risk? Which alternatives are realistic? What changes after an intervention, and how will we know whether it worked? Where do the data end and moral judgment begin? These questions do not weaken a position. They prevent powerful words from replacing analysis.
Positive peace is not paradise. It is a way of organising society so that people can notice harm, limit power, protect dignity, and correct mistakes without treating human beings as expendable material in a struggle.
The problem is not that the aspiration to justice has gone too far. The problem is that distinctions disappear. If one term describes killing, discrimination, poor policy, institutional clumsiness, and ordinary human limitation in the same way, it stops helping us think. Moral intensity rises while analytical precision falls.
There is also a quieter danger. Power can decide for itself which relationships count as harmonious, which values are mature, and which behaviour is “peaceful.” The dissenter then becomes an obstacle to peace, and peace education becomes a discipline of obedience.
The right to conflict and criticism therefore belongs inside any serious understanding of positive peace. No state, international organisation, or Peaceful World can declare its own image of the “peaceful person” final. We can propose definitions and practices, but we should keep them open to testing, cultural dialogue, and revision.
What matters here is not the size of the promise but the mechanism. How exactly does an institution produce preventable harm? Who bears the risk? Which alternatives are realistic? What changes after an intervention, and how will we know whether it worked? Where do the data end and moral judgment begin? These questions do not weaken a position. They prevent powerful words from replacing analysis.
Positive peace is not paradise. It is a way of organising society so that people can notice harm, limit power, protect dignity, and correct mistakes without treating human beings as expendable material in a struggle.
12. Who Defines Peace? Power, Local Experience, and Everyday Life
No definition of peace is completely neutral. It directs attention, money, and legitimacy. When peace is reduced to state stability, protest begins to look like a threat. When peace is tied to exporting a single institutional model, local forms of coexistence are dismissed as “not modern enough.” When peace is defined as harmony, people who have been harmed may be pressed to reconcile before the harm is even acknowledged.
Critiques of so-called liberal peacebuilding showed how external actors sometimes transferred a standard package of reforms from one country to another: elections, market reforms, administrative restructuring, and support for civil society, without sufficient attention to local history and actual relations of power. This does not mean human rights or free institutions are “foreign culture.” The problem begins when universal principles are replaced by a ready-made organisational model, while local participation is reduced to consultation after the important decisions have already been made. [36]
The everyday peace approach draws attention to small practices through which people avoid escalation: choosing words carefully, avoiding dangerous topics, maintaining neighbourly ties, and creating informal rules of coexistence. National indexes and project reports often miss these practices. Yet everyday strategies should not be romanticised. Sometimes adaptation saves lives; sometimes it entrenches silence and inequality. The value of the approach is that it brings lived experience back into the analysis, not that every local practice is automatically peaceful. [25]
A gender perspective changes the scale of analysis. A country may not be at war while women and children continue to face domestic, sexual, or institutional violence. A formal peace process may overlook the experience of those who are barely represented at the negotiating table. The UN Women, Peace and Security agenda links the quality of peace with participation, protection, prevention, and recovery. UN Women data continue to show that women remain substantially underrepresented in formal negotiations and that only some peace agreements contain gender provisions. [31]
A useful definition of peace must combine universal protection of life and dignity with knowledge of local context — how harm actually arises and how it can be prevented. Local experience does not cancel rights. Universal principles do not remove the obligation to listen to those who live inside the system.
Critiques of so-called liberal peacebuilding showed how external actors sometimes transferred a standard package of reforms from one country to another: elections, market reforms, administrative restructuring, and support for civil society, without sufficient attention to local history and actual relations of power. This does not mean human rights or free institutions are “foreign culture.” The problem begins when universal principles are replaced by a ready-made organisational model, while local participation is reduced to consultation after the important decisions have already been made. [36]
The everyday peace approach draws attention to small practices through which people avoid escalation: choosing words carefully, avoiding dangerous topics, maintaining neighbourly ties, and creating informal rules of coexistence. National indexes and project reports often miss these practices. Yet everyday strategies should not be romanticised. Sometimes adaptation saves lives; sometimes it entrenches silence and inequality. The value of the approach is that it brings lived experience back into the analysis, not that every local practice is automatically peaceful. [25]
A gender perspective changes the scale of analysis. A country may not be at war while women and children continue to face domestic, sexual, or institutional violence. A formal peace process may overlook the experience of those who are barely represented at the negotiating table. The UN Women, Peace and Security agenda links the quality of peace with participation, protection, prevention, and recovery. UN Women data continue to show that women remain substantially underrepresented in formal negotiations and that only some peace agreements contain gender provisions. [31]
A useful definition of peace must combine universal protection of life and dignity with knowledge of local context — how harm actually arises and how it can be prevented. Local experience does not cancel rights. Universal principles do not remove the obligation to listen to those who live inside the system.
13. What Peace Indexes Actually Measure
The desire to measure peace is understandable. Without indicators, it is easy to present the number of conferences held, declarations published, or people trained as evidence of success. But every index first answers a philosophical question: which signs count as peace, how should they be weighted, and which data should we trust?
The Global Peace Index evaluates countries across ongoing conflict, societal safety and security, and militarisation. It is primarily a map of negative peace: how much organised violence affects a society and how safe everyday life is. The Positive Peace Index attempts to measure conditions associated with durable peace, including institutions, resources, information, rights, human capital, and relationships. [7]
Indexes like these help compare change and identify risk. The Institute for Economics & Peace compares Positive Peace measures with current levels of peacefulness and treats the gap between them as a possible warning sign. That can be useful for early warning, but statistical association does not by itself explain causation. A stable economy may support institutions, while functioning institutions support the economy. Access to information may reduce some risks, but in a polarised environment it does not guarantee meaningful public discussion.
An index inevitably compresses cultural differences. Trust in government may reflect institutional effectiveness, or fear, or lack of alternative information. Low levels of protest may indicate consent or repression. Even high educational attainment does not prove that a society can resist dehumanisation.
Peace therefore has to be measured at several levels: deaths and incidents of violence, institutional performance, trust, language, the educational environment, and the testimony of people themselves. None of these sources describes the whole picture.
Reach should not be confused with change. A view count shows that material reached an audience. Answers to assessment questions may show whether someone understood an idea. A change in language in a real situation may show whether the person tried to apply it. Some behaviours are harder to measure: refusing to forward dehumanising content, acknowledging harm committed by one’s own group, protecting someone without collective revenge, and refusing to treat another person merely as a means. Yet these are more meaningful signs of peace literacy.
A Comparative Framework
In 2026, the Global Peace Index continues to organise its analysis around three broad domains: ongoing domestic and international conflict, societal safety and security, and militarisation. Its strength is the ability to compare organised violence and safety consistently across countries. Its limitation is that the state remains the main unit of analysis, so differences within a country are compressed into one national score. [7]
For long-term work, one index is less useful than a system of four groups of indicators. The first tracks immediate harm: deaths, injuries, threats, displacement, and access to protection. The second assesses institutions: law, participation, corruption, trust, and ways of resolving conflict. The third examines relationships: recognition, segregation, cooperation, and expectations of future violence. The fourth looks at peace literacy: understanding escalation, the quality of decisions, and practical behaviour.
• Immediate harm. Observe deaths, injuries, attacks, threats, displacement, and access to protection. Useful methods include administrative data, conflict monitoring, and surveys of experienced violence. These measures do not prove that the causes have been addressed or that violence will not return.
• Institutional performance. Observe access to law, participation, corruption, trust, and dispute-resolution mechanisms. Useful methods include indexes, institutional audits, surveys, and case studies. These measures do not prove that rules work equally for everyone.
• Quality of relationships. Observe recognition, cooperation, segregation, expectations, and fear. Useful methods include social-network analysis, interviews, local indicators, and observation. These measures do not prove that good relationships will survive a major crisis.
• Peace literacy. Observe knowledge, the ability to distinguish mechanisms, decisions, language, and behaviour. Useful methods include scenario-based tasks, pre- and post-learning assessment, observation of practice, and qualitative feedback. These measures do not prove that education has automatically changed institutions.
The Global Peace Index evaluates countries across ongoing conflict, societal safety and security, and militarisation. It is primarily a map of negative peace: how much organised violence affects a society and how safe everyday life is. The Positive Peace Index attempts to measure conditions associated with durable peace, including institutions, resources, information, rights, human capital, and relationships. [7]
Indexes like these help compare change and identify risk. The Institute for Economics & Peace compares Positive Peace measures with current levels of peacefulness and treats the gap between them as a possible warning sign. That can be useful for early warning, but statistical association does not by itself explain causation. A stable economy may support institutions, while functioning institutions support the economy. Access to information may reduce some risks, but in a polarised environment it does not guarantee meaningful public discussion.
An index inevitably compresses cultural differences. Trust in government may reflect institutional effectiveness, or fear, or lack of alternative information. Low levels of protest may indicate consent or repression. Even high educational attainment does not prove that a society can resist dehumanisation.
Peace therefore has to be measured at several levels: deaths and incidents of violence, institutional performance, trust, language, the educational environment, and the testimony of people themselves. None of these sources describes the whole picture.
Reach should not be confused with change. A view count shows that material reached an audience. Answers to assessment questions may show whether someone understood an idea. A change in language in a real situation may show whether the person tried to apply it. Some behaviours are harder to measure: refusing to forward dehumanising content, acknowledging harm committed by one’s own group, protecting someone without collective revenge, and refusing to treat another person merely as a means. Yet these are more meaningful signs of peace literacy.
A Comparative Framework
In 2026, the Global Peace Index continues to organise its analysis around three broad domains: ongoing domestic and international conflict, societal safety and security, and militarisation. Its strength is the ability to compare organised violence and safety consistently across countries. Its limitation is that the state remains the main unit of analysis, so differences within a country are compressed into one national score. [7]
For long-term work, one index is less useful than a system of four groups of indicators. The first tracks immediate harm: deaths, injuries, threats, displacement, and access to protection. The second assesses institutions: law, participation, corruption, trust, and ways of resolving conflict. The third examines relationships: recognition, segregation, cooperation, and expectations of future violence. The fourth looks at peace literacy: understanding escalation, the quality of decisions, and practical behaviour.
• Immediate harm. Observe deaths, injuries, attacks, threats, displacement, and access to protection. Useful methods include administrative data, conflict monitoring, and surveys of experienced violence. These measures do not prove that the causes have been addressed or that violence will not return.
• Institutional performance. Observe access to law, participation, corruption, trust, and dispute-resolution mechanisms. Useful methods include indexes, institutional audits, surveys, and case studies. These measures do not prove that rules work equally for everyone.
• Quality of relationships. Observe recognition, cooperation, segregation, expectations, and fear. Useful methods include social-network analysis, interviews, local indicators, and observation. These measures do not prove that good relationships will survive a major crisis.
• Peace literacy. Observe knowledge, the ability to distinguish mechanisms, decisions, language, and behaviour. Useful methods include scenario-based tasks, pre- and post-learning assessment, observation of practice, and qualitative feedback. These measures do not prove that education has automatically changed institutions.
14. Critiquing Galtung: Where the Concept Becomes Too Broad
Galtung’s contribution is difficult to overstate, but his terms should not become untouchable doctrine. Criticism is not an attempt to reject peace research; it is a way to make it more precise. If we demand intellectual honesty from military and state rhetoric, our favourite peacebuilding concepts must be able to survive the same scrutiny.
14.1. When “Violence” Describes Too Much
The main objection concerns the breadth of structural violence. The concept can include phenomena usually described as injustice, inequality, power, or institutional failure. If violence is defined as any gap between people’s potential and their actual development, almost every preventable loss of opportunity can enter the category. The term keeps its moral force but loses analytical precision. [12, 13]
14.2. Who Is Responsible — and for What?
With direct violence, the link between an act and its harm is often relatively clear. In a complex social system, causes are distributed. Illness, poverty, or shorter life expectancy may depend on history, policy, geography, personal choices, and many institutions. It is easier to call the outcome violence than to trace responsibility and identify a change that would genuinely reduce harm.
14.3. When Positive Peace Becomes a Name for Everything Good
If positive peace includes complete justice, development, equality, rights, ecological sustainability, and psychological well-being, peace research risks absorbing almost all of the social sciences. Nils Petter Gleditsch and his co-authors argued that this expansion opened important questions but also blurred the field’s boundaries and made hypotheses harder to test. [14]
14.4. Why “Culture” Is Not Enough as an Explanation
Cultural violence is sometimes used as a universal explanation: a society causes harm because its culture legitimises the harm. But every culture contains internal contradictions. Traditions can hold texts of war and mercy, hierarchy and equality, revenge and forgiveness at the same time. Without analysing specific actors and mechanisms, an appeal to “culture” easily becomes a stereotype about an entire people.
14.5. What Research Supports — and What Remains Contested
A theory should be judged not by the authority of its founder but by how well its proposed mechanisms can be tested. Contemporary research supports some of Galtung’s original intuitions. Persistent inequalities between culturally defined groups can increase the risk of conflict mobilisation, while cultural and status hierarchies can shape how inequality becomes politically salient.
But research does not provide one simple answer. Hillesund and Østby’s 2026 review shows that inequality among individuals and culturally defined groups is not automatically connected to violence. Much depends on measurement, political context, and mechanisms of mobilisation. For peace literacy, the lesson is important. Galtung can help us notice systemic vulnerability early, but answering the causal question requires more precise indicators and models than the original theory could provide. [15]
14.1. When “Violence” Describes Too Much
The main objection concerns the breadth of structural violence. The concept can include phenomena usually described as injustice, inequality, power, or institutional failure. If violence is defined as any gap between people’s potential and their actual development, almost every preventable loss of opportunity can enter the category. The term keeps its moral force but loses analytical precision. [12, 13]
14.2. Who Is Responsible — and for What?
With direct violence, the link between an act and its harm is often relatively clear. In a complex social system, causes are distributed. Illness, poverty, or shorter life expectancy may depend on history, policy, geography, personal choices, and many institutions. It is easier to call the outcome violence than to trace responsibility and identify a change that would genuinely reduce harm.
14.3. When Positive Peace Becomes a Name for Everything Good
If positive peace includes complete justice, development, equality, rights, ecological sustainability, and psychological well-being, peace research risks absorbing almost all of the social sciences. Nils Petter Gleditsch and his co-authors argued that this expansion opened important questions but also blurred the field’s boundaries and made hypotheses harder to test. [14]
14.4. Why “Culture” Is Not Enough as an Explanation
Cultural violence is sometimes used as a universal explanation: a society causes harm because its culture legitimises the harm. But every culture contains internal contradictions. Traditions can hold texts of war and mercy, hierarchy and equality, revenge and forgiveness at the same time. Without analysing specific actors and mechanisms, an appeal to “culture” easily becomes a stereotype about an entire people.
14.5. What Research Supports — and What Remains Contested
A theory should be judged not by the authority of its founder but by how well its proposed mechanisms can be tested. Contemporary research supports some of Galtung’s original intuitions. Persistent inequalities between culturally defined groups can increase the risk of conflict mobilisation, while cultural and status hierarchies can shape how inequality becomes politically salient.
But research does not provide one simple answer. Hillesund and Østby’s 2026 review shows that inequality among individuals and culturally defined groups is not automatically connected to violence. Much depends on measurement, political context, and mechanisms of mobilisation. For peace literacy, the lesson is important. Galtung can help us notice systemic vulnerability early, but answering the causal question requires more precise indicators and models than the original theory could provide. [15]
15. Beyond Galtung: What Later Approaches Added
Criticism of positive peace did not take peace research back to the formula “no war means peace.” Instead, one large concept split into several more precise questions. What is happening to the individual person? What is the quality of relationships? What do people do in everyday life? Can an agreement survive a new crisis? How are local, national, and global levels connected?
15.1. Human Security
Human security shifts attention from the state to the survival, livelihood, and dignity of the individual person. UN General Assembly Resolution 66/290 emphasises people-centred, context-specific approaches that combine prevention, protection, and empowerment. Human security is not a synonym for positive peace, but it makes an important correction: a state may be territorially secure while its citizens live in fear, poverty, and without effective rights. [27]
15.2. Relational Peace
Relational approaches ask not only whether violence is occurring in a territory, but what kind of relationship exists among the actors. In the framework developed by Söderström, Åkebo, and Jarstad, peaceful relations involve deliberation, non-domination, cooperation, mutual recognition, and trust. They also involve seeing the other side as a legitimate partner or friend. [23] Morgan Brigg proposes a broader view. Relational peace, in his account, is not merely a checklist of qualities but a way of understanding peace as an outcome of continuously changing relationships. That perspective captures process and cultural diversity more effectively, although it is harder to apply through uniform criteria across different contexts. [24]
15.3. Everyday Peace
The everyday peace approach notices what treaties and national indexes often miss: how people lower tension, negotiate the use of shared space, preserve ties across groups, and avoid words that might trigger violence. Its value lies in these details. But it should not be used to romanticise adaptation to oppression. Sometimes silence preserves life; sometimes it is evidence that peace has not yet arrived.
15.4. Durability and Recovery: Stable, Quality, and Sustaining Peace
Kenneth Boulding wrote about stable peace — relationships in which war becomes virtually unthinkable. Peter Wallensteen developed the idea of quality peace, focusing on security, dignity, and interaction after civil war. The United Nations uses sustaining peace to describe continuing work to prevent conflict and support recovery. [18, 28, 33] Rather than imagining one ideal end state, these approaches ask how long peace lasts, what quality it has, and whether it can survive new tensions.
15.5. Linking Levels: A Trans-scalar Approach
Positive peace cannot be built at one level alone. Global financial, technological, and legal processes affect local conflicts, while everyday relationships can support or undermine national agreements. Gearoid Millar proposes understanding positive peace as a system linking levels from the local to the global, rather than as a list of qualities belonging to a single state. [26]
These approaches do not add up to one new perfect formula. Each answers a different question. Human security centres the person; relational peace focuses on relationships; everyday peace highlights lived practice. Stable, quality, and sustaining peace focus on durability, while trans-scalar approaches connect different levels. Together they provide a more honest picture than forcing one concept of positive peace to explain everything.
A Compact Comparison
• Human security. Contribution: centres survival, livelihood, and human dignity. It corrects the tendency to reduce security to the protection of the state. Its limit is breadth: it can expand to include almost all social policy.
• Relational peace. Contribution: examines the quality of specific relationships and mutual recognition. It corrects the tendency to reduce peace to territory or a simple war/no-war distinction. Its criteria are necessarily context-sensitive.
• Everyday peace. Contribution: restores people’s lived practices to the analysis. It corrects top-down national indexes and project-centred accounts. Its main risk is confusing adaptation with peace.
• Stable, quality, and sustaining peace. Contribution: focuses on durability, quality, and preventing recurrence. It corrects the idea that peace is a one-time agreement. Its limit is methodological: it requires long observation and several kinds of evidence.
• Linking levels. Contribution: connects local, national, and global processes. It corrects analyses that treat those levels separately. Its limit is causal complexity: the links are often difficult to demonstrate precisely.
15.1. Human Security
Human security shifts attention from the state to the survival, livelihood, and dignity of the individual person. UN General Assembly Resolution 66/290 emphasises people-centred, context-specific approaches that combine prevention, protection, and empowerment. Human security is not a synonym for positive peace, but it makes an important correction: a state may be territorially secure while its citizens live in fear, poverty, and without effective rights. [27]
15.2. Relational Peace
Relational approaches ask not only whether violence is occurring in a territory, but what kind of relationship exists among the actors. In the framework developed by Söderström, Åkebo, and Jarstad, peaceful relations involve deliberation, non-domination, cooperation, mutual recognition, and trust. They also involve seeing the other side as a legitimate partner or friend. [23] Morgan Brigg proposes a broader view. Relational peace, in his account, is not merely a checklist of qualities but a way of understanding peace as an outcome of continuously changing relationships. That perspective captures process and cultural diversity more effectively, although it is harder to apply through uniform criteria across different contexts. [24]
15.3. Everyday Peace
The everyday peace approach notices what treaties and national indexes often miss: how people lower tension, negotiate the use of shared space, preserve ties across groups, and avoid words that might trigger violence. Its value lies in these details. But it should not be used to romanticise adaptation to oppression. Sometimes silence preserves life; sometimes it is evidence that peace has not yet arrived.
15.4. Durability and Recovery: Stable, Quality, and Sustaining Peace
Kenneth Boulding wrote about stable peace — relationships in which war becomes virtually unthinkable. Peter Wallensteen developed the idea of quality peace, focusing on security, dignity, and interaction after civil war. The United Nations uses sustaining peace to describe continuing work to prevent conflict and support recovery. [18, 28, 33] Rather than imagining one ideal end state, these approaches ask how long peace lasts, what quality it has, and whether it can survive new tensions.
15.5. Linking Levels: A Trans-scalar Approach
Positive peace cannot be built at one level alone. Global financial, technological, and legal processes affect local conflicts, while everyday relationships can support or undermine national agreements. Gearoid Millar proposes understanding positive peace as a system linking levels from the local to the global, rather than as a list of qualities belonging to a single state. [26]
These approaches do not add up to one new perfect formula. Each answers a different question. Human security centres the person; relational peace focuses on relationships; everyday peace highlights lived practice. Stable, quality, and sustaining peace focus on durability, while trans-scalar approaches connect different levels. Together they provide a more honest picture than forcing one concept of positive peace to explain everything.
A Compact Comparison
• Human security. Contribution: centres survival, livelihood, and human dignity. It corrects the tendency to reduce security to the protection of the state. Its limit is breadth: it can expand to include almost all social policy.
• Relational peace. Contribution: examines the quality of specific relationships and mutual recognition. It corrects the tendency to reduce peace to territory or a simple war/no-war distinction. Its criteria are necessarily context-sensitive.
• Everyday peace. Contribution: restores people’s lived practices to the analysis. It corrects top-down national indexes and project-centred accounts. Its main risk is confusing adaptation with peace.
• Stable, quality, and sustaining peace. Contribution: focuses on durability, quality, and preventing recurrence. It corrects the idea that peace is a one-time agreement. Its limit is methodological: it requires long observation and several kinds of evidence.
• Linking levels. Contribution: connects local, national, and global processes. It corrects analyses that treat those levels separately. Its limit is causal complexity: the links are often difficult to demonstrate precisely.
16. What Survives the Critique
Criticism does not return us to the idea that peace is simply the absence of fighting. A formally calm society can reproduce humiliation, fear, exclusion, and vulnerability for years. These conditions do not automatically cause war, but in some circumstances they make people more vulnerable to propaganda, political mobilisation driven by hostility, and forced participation in war.
What remains most useful in Galtung is the habit of looking beyond a single act of violence. Direct harm, institutions, and culture do not form a mechanical chain, but they influence one another. A long war changes law, the economy, education, and language. A discriminatory order can make propaganda more persuasive, while dehumanisation lowers the moral barrier to the next act of violence.
The depth of an explanation does not depend on using the word “structure.” It depends on showing a mechanism: who makes decisions, how risk is distributed, which signs precede escalation, which intervention would actually reduce harm, and which new problems that intervention might create. This is particularly important in peace education, where good intentions are too easily mistaken for demonstrated results.
The constructive task also remains. It is not enough to repeat what we oppose. Societies need functioning alternatives to violence: law, skills, forms of participation, cultural images, economic incentives, and organisations capable of preserving those alternatives during crisis. Empty space rarely stays peaceful; it is filled by whoever already has language, resources, and discipline. [16, 18, 19]
What remains most useful in Galtung is the habit of looking beyond a single act of violence. Direct harm, institutions, and culture do not form a mechanical chain, but they influence one another. A long war changes law, the economy, education, and language. A discriminatory order can make propaganda more persuasive, while dehumanisation lowers the moral barrier to the next act of violence.
The depth of an explanation does not depend on using the word “structure.” It depends on showing a mechanism: who makes decisions, how risk is distributed, which signs precede escalation, which intervention would actually reduce harm, and which new problems that intervention might create. This is particularly important in peace education, where good intentions are too easily mistaken for demonstrated results.
The constructive task also remains. It is not enough to repeat what we oppose. Societies need functioning alternatives to violence: law, skills, forms of participation, cultural images, economic incentives, and organisations capable of preserving those alternatives during crisis. Empty space rarely stays peaceful; it is filled by whoever already has language, resources, and discipline. [16, 18, 19]
PART IV · A PEACEFUL WORLD WORKING MODEL
17. A Peaceful World Working Definition of Peace
Peaceful World proposes a working definition that connects a moral horizon with criteria useful for analysis and education. The lower boundary is the end of direct violence, a refusal to normalise killing or turn people into means to political ends, and an obligation to exhaust nonviolent means of protection. The moral horizon is a world in which protecting life does not require sacrificing some people for the sake of others, and nonviolent methods increasingly reduce the need to cause harm. A useful definition should be broad enough to describe the system as a whole and precise enough to test concrete decisions. It should remain open to criticism, refinement, and translation into educational goals. [20]
WORKING DEFINITION
Peace is a society’s continuing ability to protect life and dignity and to navigate conflict without making killing, humiliation, or collective punishment normal. That ability is sustained by people, relationships, and institutions. When harm has already occurred, peace requires restoring safety, rights, and the possibility of a shared future. Its moral direction is a society in which protecting life does not require sacrificing some people for the sake of others, nonviolent means increasingly reduce the need to cause harm, and killing ceases to be a routine political instrument.
A Peaceful World Map of Peace
The framework moves from a minimum condition to a resilient system and a moral horizon.
• Minimum threshold. Direct violence stops and life is protected.
• Situation. Has the immediate harm stopped?
• Relationships. Is there recognition, trust, and a possibility of a shared future?
• Institutions. Can rights be protected and disputes resolved without weapons?
• Skills. Can people recognise escalation and avoid multiplying harm?
• Moral horizon. A society in which protecting life does not turn a person into a means, and nonviolent ways of responding increasingly replace harmful ones.
Every part of this definition matters. Peace is never secured once and for all; every serious crisis tests its resilience. The definition includes people, relationships, and institutions because personal decency cannot replace law, while good law does not work without people willing to apply it to “our side” as well as “theirs.” Conflict does not disappear; the way people deal with it changes. Repair belongs inside the definition because peace is needed after harm has already been done, not only before it.
Three narrower ideas follow from the definition. Minimum peace means protection from immediate organised violence, whether it comes from an opponent, an armed group, or one’s own institutions. Resilient peace describes relationships and institutions that do not return automatically to familiar violence when a new conflict appears. Peace literacy concerns people and communities: do they understand escalation, examine means that are presented as protective, apply one moral standard to “us” and “them,” and take part in repair?
This definition does not promise complete happiness, equality, or harmony. All of these can strengthen peace, but none is automatically identical with peace. Sometimes a specific dangerous act has to be stopped. But the right to stop an act is not the right to treat a person as an instrument, and legality alone does not prove moral permissibility. Anyone proposing force or deprivation of liberty bears the burden of showing a concrete threat, strict necessity, the absence of a less harmful alternative, proportionality, and accountability. An exception should not become the norm.
WORKING DEFINITION
Peace is a society’s continuing ability to protect life and dignity and to navigate conflict without making killing, humiliation, or collective punishment normal. That ability is sustained by people, relationships, and institutions. When harm has already occurred, peace requires restoring safety, rights, and the possibility of a shared future. Its moral direction is a society in which protecting life does not require sacrificing some people for the sake of others, nonviolent means increasingly reduce the need to cause harm, and killing ceases to be a routine political instrument.
A Peaceful World Map of Peace
The framework moves from a minimum condition to a resilient system and a moral horizon.
• Minimum threshold. Direct violence stops and life is protected.
• Situation. Has the immediate harm stopped?
• Relationships. Is there recognition, trust, and a possibility of a shared future?
• Institutions. Can rights be protected and disputes resolved without weapons?
• Skills. Can people recognise escalation and avoid multiplying harm?
• Moral horizon. A society in which protecting life does not turn a person into a means, and nonviolent ways of responding increasingly replace harmful ones.
Every part of this definition matters. Peace is never secured once and for all; every serious crisis tests its resilience. The definition includes people, relationships, and institutions because personal decency cannot replace law, while good law does not work without people willing to apply it to “our side” as well as “theirs.” Conflict does not disappear; the way people deal with it changes. Repair belongs inside the definition because peace is needed after harm has already been done, not only before it.
Three narrower ideas follow from the definition. Minimum peace means protection from immediate organised violence, whether it comes from an opponent, an armed group, or one’s own institutions. Resilient peace describes relationships and institutions that do not return automatically to familiar violence when a new conflict appears. Peace literacy concerns people and communities: do they understand escalation, examine means that are presented as protective, apply one moral standard to “us” and “them,” and take part in repair?
This definition does not promise complete happiness, equality, or harmony. All of these can strengthen peace, but none is automatically identical with peace. Sometimes a specific dangerous act has to be stopped. But the right to stop an act is not the right to treat a person as an instrument, and legality alone does not prove moral permissibility. Anyone proposing force or deprivation of liberty bears the burden of showing a concrete threat, strict necessity, the absence of a less harmful alternative, proportionality, and accountability. An exception should not become the norm.
18. What Makes Peace Resilient
A peaceful system has no single foundation. Security, law, political channels, social conditions, culture, and human skills support one another — or pull one another down. It is more useful to think of them not as steps on a ladder toward an ideal society, but as four areas in which different kinds of failure can occur. [20]
18.1. Safety, Law, and Accountability
The foundation is protection from killing, torture, assault, abduction, and physical coercion, regardless of whether the threat comes from a private individual, an armed group, a foreign state, or one’s own authorities. Safety becomes durable only when a person can obtain legal protection, refuse participation in killing or other grave violence, challenge a decision, and have a violation recognised. Peace without accountability can become a victor’s peace; accountability without evidence and individual responsibility can become collective punishment.
18.2. Institutions for Conflict and Social Resilience
Societies need functioning nonviolent channels for conflict: courts, elections, negotiation, local government, trade unions, independent journalism, mediation, civic organisations, and protest. Their strength also depends on the social environment. Extreme poverty, corruption, segregation, education systems closed to criticism, and systemic impunity are not one and the same form of violence, but they create predictable vulnerability to fear, recruitment, and political manipulation.
18.3. Culture, Information, and Peace Literacy
The language used in media, school narratives, memes, films, sermons, and political rhetoric shapes whose pain feels real and which revenge appears heroic. Peace literacy here means recognising dehumanisation, resisting pressure from one’s own group, distinguishing protection from revenge and from coercion renamed as protection, understanding trauma without excusing harm, and acknowledging responsibility on one’s own side. Culture cannot replace law, and personal skill cannot replace institutions. But without cultural support and human skills, formal institutions can quickly become empty shells. This is why contemporary UNESCO guidance links education for peace with critical thinking, empathy, and resilience to hate speech. [17, 30]
18.4. Repair and the Future
Once harm has occurred, work begins that no agreement can complete by itself: finding missing people, preserving memory, restoring rights, addressing trauma, providing reparations, publicly acknowledging harm, and changing relationships. Reconciliation cannot be demanded before truth and safety. At the same time, memory that leaves no room for a shared future can become an inherited readiness for another war. A shared future also includes the safety of children and future generations. Peace that merely transfers the cost to people who had no part in the decision remains fragile.
These areas matter differently in different situations. Sometimes education prevents direct harm; sometimes stopping immediate violence creates the space in which education becomes possible. Law without cultural support can remain formal, while culture without law is powerless against organised coercion. The resilience of peace is therefore better tested by whether these parts hold together under pressure than by how impressive any one element looks on its own.
Three principles can help test this model. First, a strong moral claim should rest on facts, show a mechanism, and acknowledge the limits of certainty. Second, one moral standard does not mean equal responsibility: the same criteria can lead to different judgments because acts, circumstances, and degrees of culpability differ. Third, a system should be able to correct itself — recognise harm it has caused, accept criticism, and change what is not working before another crisis forces the issue.
18.1. Safety, Law, and Accountability
The foundation is protection from killing, torture, assault, abduction, and physical coercion, regardless of whether the threat comes from a private individual, an armed group, a foreign state, or one’s own authorities. Safety becomes durable only when a person can obtain legal protection, refuse participation in killing or other grave violence, challenge a decision, and have a violation recognised. Peace without accountability can become a victor’s peace; accountability without evidence and individual responsibility can become collective punishment.
18.2. Institutions for Conflict and Social Resilience
Societies need functioning nonviolent channels for conflict: courts, elections, negotiation, local government, trade unions, independent journalism, mediation, civic organisations, and protest. Their strength also depends on the social environment. Extreme poverty, corruption, segregation, education systems closed to criticism, and systemic impunity are not one and the same form of violence, but they create predictable vulnerability to fear, recruitment, and political manipulation.
18.3. Culture, Information, and Peace Literacy
The language used in media, school narratives, memes, films, sermons, and political rhetoric shapes whose pain feels real and which revenge appears heroic. Peace literacy here means recognising dehumanisation, resisting pressure from one’s own group, distinguishing protection from revenge and from coercion renamed as protection, understanding trauma without excusing harm, and acknowledging responsibility on one’s own side. Culture cannot replace law, and personal skill cannot replace institutions. But without cultural support and human skills, formal institutions can quickly become empty shells. This is why contemporary UNESCO guidance links education for peace with critical thinking, empathy, and resilience to hate speech. [17, 30]
18.4. Repair and the Future
Once harm has occurred, work begins that no agreement can complete by itself: finding missing people, preserving memory, restoring rights, addressing trauma, providing reparations, publicly acknowledging harm, and changing relationships. Reconciliation cannot be demanded before truth and safety. At the same time, memory that leaves no room for a shared future can become an inherited readiness for another war. A shared future also includes the safety of children and future generations. Peace that merely transfers the cost to people who had no part in the decision remains fragile.
These areas matter differently in different situations. Sometimes education prevents direct harm; sometimes stopping immediate violence creates the space in which education becomes possible. Law without cultural support can remain formal, while culture without law is powerless against organised coercion. The resilience of peace is therefore better tested by whether these parts hold together under pressure than by how impressive any one element looks on its own.
Three principles can help test this model. First, a strong moral claim should rest on facts, show a mechanism, and acknowledge the limits of certainty. Second, one moral standard does not mean equal responsibility: the same criteria can lead to different judgments because acts, circumstances, and degrees of culpability differ. Third, a system should be able to correct itself — recognise harm it has caused, accept criticism, and change what is not working before another crisis forces the issue.
19. Peace Literacy: Learning to Distinguish Levels
Peace literacy is not the ability to recite the correct definition of positive peace. It is the ability to navigate situations in which the same moral words are used for opposite purposes. Peace, protection, justice, security, and reconciliation become dangerous precisely when their boundaries disappear.
A person with strong peace literacy understands that a ceasefire saves lives but does not necessarily restore rights. They can see that injustice may require resistance without assuming that resistance permits any form of harm. They distinguish understanding a cause from excusing an act. They recognise the human dignity of a wrongdoer without erasing responsibility.
Peace literacy also requires distinctions of scale. A personal conflict should not automatically be described as a war, and international aggression should not be reduced to a communication failure. Dialogue skills are useful, but they do not replace the need to stop an organised attack. At the same time, invoking defence does not remove the obligation to examine means, respect freedom of conscience, and limit power. Legal accountability is necessary, but it does not replace the work of addressing trauma and changing culture.
Intellectual caution matters too. Complex conflicts rarely fit into one causal diagram. We need to distinguish what is established, what remains interpretation, where moral judgment begins, and where evidence is still insufficient. That discipline does not weaken a position. It protects it from propagandistic certainty.
The hardest test of peace literacy is how we judge our own group. Dehumanisation by an opponent is easy to notice; it is harder to see when our own side renames harm, shields “our people” from accountability, or treats compassion as suspicious weakness. One of the rarest peace skills is applying the same moral standard to “us” and “them.” In this essay we call that principle omnipartiality. It does not mean neutrality or dividing blame equally. Every person has equal moral worth, while the actions and responsibilities of different sides may be very different.
Knowledge tests alone are not enough to measure peace literacy. We need scenarios in which the right words collide with loyalty, fear, and uncertainty. Can a person condemn harm committed by their own group, demand evidence that a restriction is necessary, refuse to share emotionally persuasive but unverified information, and protect a victim without collective revenge? Decisions like these show whether an idea has become a practical skill.
A person with strong peace literacy understands that a ceasefire saves lives but does not necessarily restore rights. They can see that injustice may require resistance without assuming that resistance permits any form of harm. They distinguish understanding a cause from excusing an act. They recognise the human dignity of a wrongdoer without erasing responsibility.
Peace literacy also requires distinctions of scale. A personal conflict should not automatically be described as a war, and international aggression should not be reduced to a communication failure. Dialogue skills are useful, but they do not replace the need to stop an organised attack. At the same time, invoking defence does not remove the obligation to examine means, respect freedom of conscience, and limit power. Legal accountability is necessary, but it does not replace the work of addressing trauma and changing culture.
Intellectual caution matters too. Complex conflicts rarely fit into one causal diagram. We need to distinguish what is established, what remains interpretation, where moral judgment begins, and where evidence is still insufficient. That discipline does not weaken a position. It protects it from propagandistic certainty.
The hardest test of peace literacy is how we judge our own group. Dehumanisation by an opponent is easy to notice; it is harder to see when our own side renames harm, shields “our people” from accountability, or treats compassion as suspicious weakness. One of the rarest peace skills is applying the same moral standard to “us” and “them.” In this essay we call that principle omnipartiality. It does not mean neutrality or dividing blame equally. Every person has equal moral worth, while the actions and responsibilities of different sides may be very different.
Knowledge tests alone are not enough to measure peace literacy. We need scenarios in which the right words collide with loyalty, fear, and uncertainty. Can a person condemn harm committed by their own group, demand evidence that a restriction is necessary, refuse to share emotionally persuasive but unverified information, and protect a victim without collective revenge? Decisions like these show whether an idea has become a practical skill.
PART V · PEACE IN WARTIME AND PRACTICAL QUESTIONS
20. What Changes During War
The language of peace is especially easy to misuse during war. People under attack may be pressed toward premature reconciliation while the threat is still immediate. At the same time, actions by “our” state may be placed beyond moral scrutiny simply by being called defence. Structural causes do not erase responsibility for concrete acts, and being attacked does not make every response automatically permissible.
When the threat is immediate, the priority is to save life and stop the attack. Peace education should not demand passivity or leave a vulnerable person alone with an attacker. But protection is the goal; force and coercion are means proposed in its name. Anyone who uses force or coercion bears the burden of justification. They must show a concrete threat and genuine necessity, show that they have exhausted less harmful alternatives, keep the response proportionate, distinguish responsible actors from uninvolved people, remain accountable, and accept a duty to repair the harm caused. [20]
One moral standard for all sides does not mean neutrality between an aggressor and the person harmed, nor does it distribute blame equally. Aggression, crimes, and deliberate falsehoods should be named accurately, and people under attack should be protected. But the same standard must apply to everyone: aggression by one side does not automatically make torture, arbitrary detention, attacks on civilians, collective punishment, dehumanisation, or other violence by another side acceptable.
War also becomes a school. It teaches people to think in terms of enemies, makes emergency measures habitual, links dignity with revenge, and trains people to see human beings as units to be mobilised. If peace education is postponed until the war is over, it may return too late: the cultural infrastructure of violence may already have become ordinary. Peace education during war must also make room for people who are not willing to kill, carry a weapon, or give their lives to the state.
Memory and accountability must leave room for a future without replacing them with premature reconciliation. People should not be forced to forget or forgive for the sake of a reassuring photograph. But when a culture passes down nothing but inherited hatred, it makes another war part of education. The right to remember should not become a duty to carry that war forward.
When a state forces people to take part in war, detains them for conscription, or bars them from leaving the country because of sex or age, those measures are not merely technical details of defence. The same is true of language that treats people as nothing more than “manpower” or a pool of recruits. These are moral and legal questions in their own right. An external threat does not free a state from the obligation to respect freedom of conscience. The UN Human Rights Committee has recognised conscientious objection to military service as arising from freedom of thought, conscience, and religion. [38] Peaceful World also draws a moral conclusion from this principle: a person has a moral right not to participate in killing. [20]
The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights recognises the right to leave any country, including one’s own. Restrictions must be provided by law and must satisfy requirements of necessity, proportionality, and compatibility with other rights. [37, 39] Within Peaceful World’s ethical framework, participation in acts involving killing and a serious risk of death requires voluntary consent: war does not give the state unlimited moral authority over a person’s body or life. [20]
Restricting access to genuinely sensitive information or stopping a specific dangerous act can sometimes be justified, but necessity should never be assumed in advance. Those imposing the measure must identify a concrete threat and a clearly defined aim, show that less harmful alternatives have been exhausted, individualise responsibility, and keep the intervention proportionate and time-limited. Independent review and a meaningful avenue of appeal should remain available. The deeper the intervention into a person’s freedom, body, or life, the heavier the burden of justification. Otherwise war can reorganise institutions around its own logic and turn emergency rule into an ordinary method of government.
When the threat is immediate, the priority is to save life and stop the attack. Peace education should not demand passivity or leave a vulnerable person alone with an attacker. But protection is the goal; force and coercion are means proposed in its name. Anyone who uses force or coercion bears the burden of justification. They must show a concrete threat and genuine necessity, show that they have exhausted less harmful alternatives, keep the response proportionate, distinguish responsible actors from uninvolved people, remain accountable, and accept a duty to repair the harm caused. [20]
One moral standard for all sides does not mean neutrality between an aggressor and the person harmed, nor does it distribute blame equally. Aggression, crimes, and deliberate falsehoods should be named accurately, and people under attack should be protected. But the same standard must apply to everyone: aggression by one side does not automatically make torture, arbitrary detention, attacks on civilians, collective punishment, dehumanisation, or other violence by another side acceptable.
War also becomes a school. It teaches people to think in terms of enemies, makes emergency measures habitual, links dignity with revenge, and trains people to see human beings as units to be mobilised. If peace education is postponed until the war is over, it may return too late: the cultural infrastructure of violence may already have become ordinary. Peace education during war must also make room for people who are not willing to kill, carry a weapon, or give their lives to the state.
Memory and accountability must leave room for a future without replacing them with premature reconciliation. People should not be forced to forget or forgive for the sake of a reassuring photograph. But when a culture passes down nothing but inherited hatred, it makes another war part of education. The right to remember should not become a duty to carry that war forward.
When a state forces people to take part in war, detains them for conscription, or bars them from leaving the country because of sex or age, those measures are not merely technical details of defence. The same is true of language that treats people as nothing more than “manpower” or a pool of recruits. These are moral and legal questions in their own right. An external threat does not free a state from the obligation to respect freedom of conscience. The UN Human Rights Committee has recognised conscientious objection to military service as arising from freedom of thought, conscience, and religion. [38] Peaceful World also draws a moral conclusion from this principle: a person has a moral right not to participate in killing. [20]
The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights recognises the right to leave any country, including one’s own. Restrictions must be provided by law and must satisfy requirements of necessity, proportionality, and compatibility with other rights. [37, 39] Within Peaceful World’s ethical framework, participation in acts involving killing and a serious risk of death requires voluntary consent: war does not give the state unlimited moral authority over a person’s body or life. [20]
Restricting access to genuinely sensitive information or stopping a specific dangerous act can sometimes be justified, but necessity should never be assumed in advance. Those imposing the measure must identify a concrete threat and a clearly defined aim, show that less harmful alternatives have been exhausted, individualise responsibility, and keep the intervention proportionate and time-limited. Independent review and a meaningful avenue of appeal should remain available. The deeper the intervention into a person’s freedom, body, or life, the heavier the burden of justification. Otherwise war can reorganise institutions around its own logic and turn emergency rule into an ordinary method of government.
21. Peace Is Not a Pause
The distinction between negative and positive peace does not force us to choose one over the other. It helps set priorities without postponing one task until another has been completed. Immediate violence must be stopped now; at the same time, means need scrutiny, rights need protection, nonviolent alternatives need to remain available, and conditions that make another cycle of violence more likely need to change. If moral analysis, education, and rights are postponed “until victory” or “until the war is over,” emergency logic can become permanent.
Galtung gave peace research a language for seeing beyond the battlefield. His critics remind us that a broad perspective without causal precision can become a moral metaphor rather than analysis. Both lessons matter. Peace cannot be reduced to the silence of weapons, but neither should every imperfection of the world be called violence.
The architecture of peace is more than a metaphor. It is designed before disaster, tested under pressure, and repaired after damage. It brings together security, law, ways of handling conflict, social resilience, culture, education, and recovery. Means are part of that architecture, not an afterthought to the ends. A system cannot be called peaceful when calm is achieved by normalising killing, coercion, or the dehumanisation of an enemy, one’s own citizens, or dissenters. A convincing facade does not prove that the structure works. [20]
War has long had an infrastructure of its own: budgets, agencies, schools, language, rituals, technologies, images of the enemy, and professional training. Peace has too often been presented as a feeling or a benevolent declaration. A serious alternative requires an intellectual, educational, and organisational infrastructure of comparable strength — while retaining the ability to doubt and correct itself.
Peace begins when a person stays alive. It continues where that person has the right to speak, refuse to kill, disagree without weapons, and help rebuild what has been destroyed. Its moral horizon is a society in which protecting life does not depend on sacrificing some people for the sake of others, and taking life ceases to be an ordinary political instrument. Peace is tested at the moment when a new fear offers society its most familiar answer: reduce another person — enemy, citizen, or dissenter — to a means to an end.
Practice: Five Questions to Ask Yourself
Peace literacy begins not with correct slogans but with the habit of asking uncomfortable questions. Before supporting a harsh measure, sharing a story designed to provoke a strong reaction, or excusing an action by “our” side, it is worth asking:
• What specific violence or harm am I trying to stop?
• Am I applying the same moral standard to “our side” that I apply to “theirs”?
• Is there evidence that the proposed restriction or coercion is genuinely necessary, and that less harmful options have been exhausted?
• Does my language turn a person into “material” or a “resource,” or treat an entire group as collectively guilty?
• Does my action preserve the possibility of a shared future — or make the next cycle of violence more likely?
Galtung gave peace research a language for seeing beyond the battlefield. His critics remind us that a broad perspective without causal precision can become a moral metaphor rather than analysis. Both lessons matter. Peace cannot be reduced to the silence of weapons, but neither should every imperfection of the world be called violence.
The architecture of peace is more than a metaphor. It is designed before disaster, tested under pressure, and repaired after damage. It brings together security, law, ways of handling conflict, social resilience, culture, education, and recovery. Means are part of that architecture, not an afterthought to the ends. A system cannot be called peaceful when calm is achieved by normalising killing, coercion, or the dehumanisation of an enemy, one’s own citizens, or dissenters. A convincing facade does not prove that the structure works. [20]
War has long had an infrastructure of its own: budgets, agencies, schools, language, rituals, technologies, images of the enemy, and professional training. Peace has too often been presented as a feeling or a benevolent declaration. A serious alternative requires an intellectual, educational, and organisational infrastructure of comparable strength — while retaining the ability to doubt and correct itself.
Peace begins when a person stays alive. It continues where that person has the right to speak, refuse to kill, disagree without weapons, and help rebuild what has been destroyed. Its moral horizon is a society in which protecting life does not depend on sacrificing some people for the sake of others, and taking life ceases to be an ordinary political instrument. Peace is tested at the moment when a new fear offers society its most familiar answer: reduce another person — enemy, citizen, or dissenter — to a means to an end.
Practice: Five Questions to Ask Yourself
Peace literacy begins not with correct slogans but with the habit of asking uncomfortable questions. Before supporting a harsh measure, sharing a story designed to provoke a strong reaction, or excusing an action by “our” side, it is worth asking:
• What specific violence or harm am I trying to stop?
• Am I applying the same moral standard to “our side” that I apply to “theirs”?
• Is there evidence that the proposed restriction or coercion is genuinely necessary, and that less harmful options have been exhausted?
• Does my language turn a person into “material” or a “resource,” or treat an entire group as collectively guilty?
• Does my action preserve the possibility of a shared future — or make the next cycle of violence more likely?
Frequently asked questions
Yes, in a limited but extremely important sense. A ceasefire creates negative peace by stopping immediate violence. It does not yet prove that the causes have been addressed, relationships have changed, or reliable ways of resolving disputes without weapons have been established.
Not because it is bad. The term defines peace through an absence: no war or direct violence. Its moral value is enormous, but by itself it tells us little about the quality of a society.
Positive peace is a society’s ability to deal with conflict, protect people, and repair harm in ways that keep violence from becoming normal or the only available way to resolve conflict.
Negative peace asks whether direct violence has stopped. Positive peace asks whether relationships, institutions, and social capacities make renewed violence less likely and allow conflict to be handled without returning to organised violence. The first is an indispensable minimum; the second concerns the conditions that help that minimum last.
Conflict is an incompatibility of interests, needs, values, or ideas of justice. Violence is one way of responding to conflict. A peaceful society does not eliminate conflict; it expands the ways people can pursue it without destroying dignity or taking human life.
No. The term is useful when we can identify persistent and preventable harm, a concrete institutional mechanism, the distribution of risk, and a realistic alternative. Without that, “structural violence” becomes a general expression of moral dissatisfaction rather than an analytical tool.
Individual conditions and skills can be measured: whether law works, whether people trust institutions and participate in decisions, how relations between groups develop, whether protection is accessible, and whether peace literacy skills are growing. No single index, however, can serve as a complete definition of positive peace.
No. Applying one moral standard to all sides does not mean neutrality and does not divide responsibility equally. It means valuing every person equally while assessing the means used by all sides according to the same criteria. Aggression and specific wrongdoing should therefore be named accurately, people under attack should be protected, and torture, collective punishment, dehumanisation, and forced participation in war should not be excused by any flag.
No. An external threat creates a duty to protect people, but it does not give the state unlimited moral authority over their bodies and lives. From Peaceful World’s perspective, participation in actions involving killing and a serious risk of death requires voluntary consent. Coercion does not become morally acceptable merely because it is called mobilisation or defence.
Peaceful World combines four levels of analysis — situation, relationships, institutions, and human skills — and distinguishes a measurable minimum from a moral horizon. The framework also adds a single moral standard for all sides and a burden of justification: anyone proposing force or coercion must demonstrate strict necessity. This approach preserves the value of stopping violence, allows differences in responsibility to be identified precisely, and avoids turning positive peace into a name for everything good.
Sources and notes
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Note on Terms
In this essay, negative peace and positive peace are used in the sense developed within peace research. “Negative” does not mean bad or morally inferior; it means that peace is defined through an absence, especially the absence of direct violence. Structural violence is used more narrowly: for persistent and preventable harm that arises systematically from institutional arrangements when a concrete mechanism can be shown, rather than as a general label for everything considered unjust.
The term omnipartiality is used here for a simple principle: every person has equal moral worth, and the actions of all sides should be judged by the same criteria. This is not neutrality, equal division of blame, or a refusal to assign responsibility precisely. On the contrary, one standard allows us to call aggression aggression while also examining the means used by our own side.
The term omnipartiality is used here for a simple principle: every person has equal moral worth, and the actions of all sides should be judged by the same criteria. This is not neutrality, equal division of blame, or a refusal to assign responsibility precisely. On the contrary, one standard allows us to call aggression aggression while also examining the means used by our own side.
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