Johan Galtung (1930-2024)

A few days ago I heard that the Norwegian peace researcher Johan Vincent Galtung had died, 93 years old. Galtung was certainly the most important peace researcher of his time, and one can say that without his energy and activism the field of peace research wouldn’t have been what it is now. This would already be sufficient reason to write a blog about him, but the main reason I do is that he had a clear influence on my thinking. Before I switched from sociology to philosophy, I have done some investigations in the field of peace research. I have also been a peace activist. Then it was impossible not to come across his name and not to be impressed by his ideas. However, it was not because of this interest that I stumbled upon Galtung’s name, but I first heard of Galtung when I studied sociology, for Galtung, originally a mathematician and sociologist, had written a thick and thorough book on methodology: Theory and methods of social research. Though not prescribed by the study program, I bought the book and used it often.
However, it was because of my interest in peace and peace research that I came most in touch with Galtung’s ideas and views. In 1959 Galtung was the co-founder of the Norwegian Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), and for ten years he was its first director. In 1964 he established the Journal of Peace Research, the first peace research journal in the world and still a leading journal in its field. Maybe the best article published by Galtung there is his “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research” (1969), which contains some of his best ideas. More than 50 years later, it still is worth to be read. Having left the PRIO after ten years, Johan Galtung got many functions inside and outside the academic world. Here I’ll mention them, nor will I give a list of his most important publications. They can easily be found on the internet (see for example the Wikipedia). Instead, I want to pay attention to three important ideas developed by Galtung that have had a big impact on my thinking and on the thinking of many others.

Structural violence
Violence is seen by many as a direct physical attack by one or more persons on one or more other persons. I think this does not need much explanation. We think here of intentionally hurting, beating, killing etc. of another person or persons. Also for Galtung such deeds are violence. However, according to him there is more than this, what he calls, “direct violence”. There is also a kind of violence that cannot be ascribed to individual perpetrators but that is as hurting and killing as direct violence: structural violence. Structural violence is clearly caused by humans but cannot be ascribed to individuals. It is a consequence of the social circumstances people live in, because victims of this type of violence have no access to the necessary resources that would improve their miserable circumstances; structural violence can even kill. The reasons why people cannot use the resources they need for improving their living conditions are not natural, but others prevent them from using them or don’t give them the means they should reasonably give to the victims. Galtung calls structural violence also “social injustice”. To quote Galtung (Violence, Peace, and Peace Research, pp. 170-1):

“Resources are unevenly distributed, as when income distributions are heavily skewed, literacy/education unevenly distributed, medical services existent in some districts and for some groups only, and so on. Above all the power to decide over the distribution of resources is unevenly distributed. The situation is aggravated further if the persons low on income are also low in education, low on health, and low on power - as is frequently the case because these rank dimensions tend to be heavily correlated due to the way they are tied together in the social structure… The important point here is that if people are starving when this is objectively avoidable, then violence is committed, regardless of whether there is a clear subject-action-object relation, as during a siege yesterday or no such clear relation, as in the way world economic relations are organized today… Violence with a clear subject-object relation is manifest because it is visible as action… Violence without this relation is structural, built into structure. Thus, when one husband beats his wife there is a clear case of personal violence, but when one million husbands keep one million wives in ignorance there is structural violence. Correspondingly, in a society where life expectancy is twice as high in the upper as in the lower classes, violence is exercised even if there are no concrete actors one can point to directly attacking others, as when one person kills another.”

Negative versus positive peace
In the article just quoted, Galtung makes a distinction between negative peace and positive peace. Often we say that there is peace, if there is no fighting; if there is no war. We call it also peace, if people ignore each other, even when they live together in some way. We call it also peace when the relations between people are tense, but if there is no open fighting. Sometimes we call this “armed peace”. But is peace really merely the absence of fighting? According to Galtung we can better call such a situation “negative peace”: the absence of personal violence. Against this negative idea of peace, Galtung developed the idea of positive peace: a situation in which people collaborate with each other and support each other. We can, following Galtung (p. 183), say it this way: Negative peace is the absence of direct (personal) violence, while positive peace is the absence of structural violence. Positive peace is a situation of social justice.

Peace building
Positive peace usually doesn’t develop automatically from a situation that once was a situation of violence and then has become a situation of negative peace. We must work on it. Unjust situations must be purposefully removed; people must learn to work together and to develop positive relations of cooperation and support towards those who once were their enemies. In other words, positive peace must be built. In 1975 Galtung coined the word “peace building” for this construction of positive peace in his “Three Approaches to Peace: Peacekeeping, Peacemaking, and Peacebuilding.” “In this article, he posited that ‘peace has a structure different from, perhaps over and above, peacekeeping and ad hoc peacemaking... The mechanisms that peace is based on should be built into the structure and be present as a reservoir for the system itself to draw up... More specifically, structures must be found that remove causes of wars and offer alternatives to war in situations where wars might occur.’ These observations constitute the intellectual antecedents of today’s notion of peacebuilding: an endeavor aiming to create sustainable peace by addressing the ‘root causes’ of violent conflict and eliciting indigenous capacities for peaceful management and resolution of conflict.” (from the peacebuilinginitiative.org website)

Galtung developed important concepts and ideas for a better world, but still much must be done to get them realized. In view of what presently is happening in the world, one wonders whether even the foundations of a peace building have already been laid.