Exploring the Concept of Peace

Most people assume peace simply means “no fighting.” But ask a scholar of Peace and Conflict Studies, and you’ll get a far more layered answer. A country can have no active war yet still be deeply unjust, divided, and unstable. So is that really peace? This question sits at the heart of one of the most influential ideas in the field: the distinction between negative peace and positive peace. Understanding this difference changes how we look at everything from international diplomacy to caste discrimination, communal tension, and social inequality.

What do we actually mean by peace? 🔗

For most of recorded history, peace was understood narrowly as the absence of war. If the guns fell silent and armies returned home, peace was said to exist. This is a useful definition, but a limited one. It tells us what peace is not, without telling us what peace is.

The modern, systematic study of peace is a relatively recent enterprise. The institutionalization of this research field took shape through landmarks like the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo (founded 1959), the Journal of Peace Research (1964), and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (1966). These institutions reflected a growing conviction that peace deserved the same rigorous, evidence-based study that scholars applied to war.

The figure most responsible for reshaping how we define peace is the Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung, often called the father of peace studies. In the very first issue of the Journal of Peace Research, he proposed that peace has two faces. He defined negative peace as the absence of violence and war, and positive peace as the integration of human society. This twin concept became the foundation of peace theory.

Negative peace: the absence of violence 🔗

Negative peace is the more familiar idea. It refers to the absence of direct, visible violence between groups, states, or individuals. When a ceasefire is signed, when a war ends, or when communal riots stop, a state of negative peace has been achieved.

It is called “negative” not because it is bad, but because it is defined by an absence. Something undesirable has stopped happening. The violence ended, the oppression paused, the killing ceased. Any meaningful concept of peace must include this: the absence of direct violence between states and the absence of mass killing of groups of people.

Why negative peace matters but is not enough 🔗

Negative peace is genuinely important. Stopping active bloodshed saves lives, and no one would argue that war is preferable to a ceasefire. Actions taken to achieve negative peace are those that aim to prevent or stop explicit violence from occurring. This includes peacekeeping forces, ceasefire agreements, arms-control treaties, and conflict mediation.

But here is the limitation. Two groups can stop fighting and still live in deep hostility, mutual suspicion, and isolation from one another. Imagine neighbours who have agreed not to attack each other but refuse to speak, cooperate, or trust. The violence has stopped, yet the relationship is broken. According to Galtung, this situation is better than open violence, but it is not fully peaceful, because the positive dimension of peace is missing.

Positive peace: building cooperation and integration 🔗

Positive peace is the deeper and more ambitious idea. It is not just the absence of violence but the presence of conditions that allow societies to flourish. Galtung described it as the integration of human society, meaning genuine cooperation, mutual respect, and shared wellbeing among different groups.

Where negative peace is reactive, positive peace is proactive. It asks: what attitudes, institutions, and structures sustain a peaceful society over the long term? The Institute for Economics and Peace defines positive peace as a lasting peace built on sustainable investments in economic development, strong institutions, and the societal attitudes that foster harmony.

In short, negative peace stops the war. Positive peace prevents the next one by removing its causes.

The two are complementary, not opposed 🔗

It is a mistake to view these as rival definitions. Negative peace and positive peace are complementary. For a society to be truly peaceful, there must be both the absence of violence and ongoing cooperation toward a sustainable, just order. A ceasefire without justice tends to collapse; justice without an end to violence is impossible to build. The two work together.

The hidden side of conflict: structural and cultural violence 🔗

To understand why positive peace requires so much more than ending war, we need to expand our idea of violence itself. This is Galtung’s most significant contribution. In his 1969 paper “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” he argued that violence is not only the direct, physical kind. He introduced what is now known as the conflict or violence triangle: direct violence, structural violence, and cultural violence.

Direct violence 🔗

This is the most obvious form, the kind we see and recognize instantly. War, assault, riots, and physical attacks all fall under direct violence. It has a clear actor who commits the harm and a clear victim who suffers it. Ending direct violence is the goal of negative peace.

Structural violence 🔗

Structural violence is far less visible but often far more damaging. It refers to harm built into the social, economic, and political structures of a society, harm that prevents people from meeting their basic needs. There is no single attacker, yet people suffer all the same. Galtung described it as an avoidable impairment of fundamental human needs.

Think of systems that deny certain groups access to education, healthcare, decent income, or political power. Institutionalized discrimination based on caste, class, gender, or religion is a textbook example. Structural violence tends to be stable and difficult to detect precisely because it is woven into everyday institutions, which is what makes it so persistent. In the Indian context, the long struggle against caste-based discrimination and untouchability, which the Constitution formally abolished, is a direct confrontation with structural violence.

Cultural violence 🔗

The third corner is cultural violence, a concept Galtung developed later. This refers to the aspects of culture, including religion, ideology, language, art, and media, that are used to justify or legitimize direct and structural violence. When society teaches that one group is naturally superior, or that certain people deserve less, it makes the other two forms of violence seem normal or even acceptable. Cultural violence explains why direct and structural violence are allowed to exist and persist.

Putting all three together gives us a fuller definition of positive peace. Positive peace is not merely the absence of direct violence and war, but also the absence of structural and cultural violence. Achieving it means dismantling unjust structures and challenging the cultural beliefs that prop them up.

From war prevention to peacebuilding 🔗

This expanded view of peace reshaped how scholars and practitioners think about ending conflict. If conflict has roots in unjust structures and harmful cultural attitudes, then simply stopping the fighting will not produce lasting peace. The deeper causes must be addressed.

This is the logic behind peacebuilding. Galtung argued as early as 1975 that peace must have a structure of its own, distinct from mere peacekeeping. Rather than waiting to react to violence, societies should build structures that remove the causes of war and offer alternatives to it. Peacebuilding addresses the economic, social, and political root causes of conflict and works to transform relationships between groups toward stable, peaceful coexistence.

This bottom-up approach calls for a shift away from structures of coercion toward what is often called a culture of peace. It is a far more demanding project than signing a treaty, but it is also far more durable.

Peace in the Indian intellectual tradition 🔗

While Galtung gave peace a modern academic framework, the idea that peace means more than the absence of war runs deep in Indian thought. The concept of ahimsa, or non-injury in thought, word, and deed, evolved through Vedic texts and became a central virtue across Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions. This is closely tied to the Sanskrit word shanti, meaning peace.

Mahatma Gandhi transformed ahimsa from a personal ethic into a powerful method of social and political change. His philosophy of satyagraha treated non-violence not as passive submission but as an active force for confronting injustice. In Gandhi’s view, ahimsa was the means and Truth was the end, and the two were inseparable.

Gandhi even conceived of an organized peacekeeping body, the Shanti Sena or “peace army,” dedicated to reducing communal violence through non-violent intervention. After his death, followers like Vinoba Bhave and Jayaprakash Narayan carried the idea forward. In recognition of this legacy, the United Nations declared Gandhi’s birthday, 2 October, as the International Day of Non-Violence. This tradition resonates strongly with the modern idea of positive peace: it targets the structures and attitudes that produce violence, not just the violence itself.

Why this distinction still matters today 🔗

The negative-positive peace framework is not just an academic exercise. It gives us a tool to evaluate the real state of any society. A nation may rank low on open conflict yet remain riddled with poverty, inequality, and discrimination, signs that positive peace is absent even where negative peace exists. Measuring tools like the Global Peace Index attempt to capture both dimensions, looking beyond the absence of war to the institutions and attitudes that sustain genuine peace.

The framework also acts as a useful counterweight to the realist theory of international relations, which often reduces peace to a balance of power between states. Peace, in this richer view, is something that must be actively built and constantly maintained. It demands work on relationships, institutions, and justice rather than just an end to hostilities.

So the next time you hear that a region is “at peace,” it is worth asking a sharper question. Has the violence merely stopped, or have the conditions that breed violence actually been transformed? That difference is the difference between negative and positive peace.

What do you think? If a society has no war but is marked by deep inequality and discrimination, can it honestly be called peaceful? And in your own community, which form of violence, direct, structural, or cultural, do you think is the hardest to recognize and remove?

References

1. https://www.prio.org/
2. https://www.sipri.org/
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johan_Galtung
4. https://www.visionofhumanity.org/introducing-the-concept-of-peace/
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_violence
6. https://www.india.gov.in/my-government/constitution-india
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peacebuilding
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahimsa
9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyagraha
10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanti_Sena
11. https://www.un.org/en/observances/non-violence-day
12. https://www.visionofhumanity.org/maps/