Cultural Perspectives on Peace: A Comparative Study

What does peace actually mean? It seems like a simple question, but the answer changes depending on where you stand in the world. To one tradition, peace is the firm presence of justice. To another, it is a well-ordered society held together by law. To yet another, it is the deep stillness of a quiet mind. These are not just different translations of the same word. They are different ideas about what a good life and a good world should look like. Understanding these differences is the first real step toward building lasting peace across cultures.

Why peace means different things in different cultures 🔗

Peace is one of those concepts we recognise most easily by its absence. When war stops, we say peace has arrived. But this “absence of war” idea is only one layer. The peace researcher Johan Galtung famously separated two kinds of peace: negative peace, which is simply the absence of violence, and positive peace, which is filled with restored relationships, social justice, and constructive ways of handling conflict. A ceasefire gives us negative peace. A fair and harmonious society gives us positive peace.

This distinction helps explain why cultures disagree. Each major civilisation has emphasised a different part of what positive peace contains. Some focused on justice, some on order, and some on inner tranquility. Looking at the actual words different languages use for “peace” reveals these priorities clearly, because each word carries the weight of centuries of thought behind it.

Shalom: peace as justice and wholeness 🔗

In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, the Hebrew word Shalom carries a meaning far larger than the English word “peace.” It comes from a root denoting wholeness or completeness, and its frame of reference is bound up with the idea of perfection. Shalom is not limited to the political absence of war or the social absence of quarrels. It describes a complete state of well-being that touches the physical, the moral, and the spiritual.

The most striking feature of Shalom is its tie to justice. In the Hebrew scriptures, justice is treated as the only path that leads to peace. Peace is not just an emotion or a good feeling; it implies the hard duty of being just and right. The prophets repeatedly link righteousness and peace, picturing them as flourishing together. This means a society cannot claim true peace while injustice continues within it.

Peace as a duty, not just a feeling 🔗

One useful way to understand Shalom is to look at how it works as a verb. In biblical law, the same root word is used to mean making restitution or restoring what was lost. If you caused someone a loss, you were obliged to make it good. Peace, in this view, is something you actively do and restore, not just a calm you passively enjoy. This makes the Judaeo-Christian conception deeply practical and demanding. It asks people to repair broken relationships and meet unmet needs as a condition of peace itself.

Eirene and Pax: peace as order 🔗

The classical Greek and Roman traditions approached peace through the lens of order rather than justice. In Greek mythology, Eirene was the goddess of peace, one of three sisters known as the Horae. Her sisters were tellingly named Eunomia, meaning good order, and Dike, meaning justice. Eirene was usually shown holding the infant Ploutos, the god of wealth, because peace was understood as the condition that allowed prosperity to grow. When fields could be ploughed and trade could flourish, peace was present.

The Roman concept of Pax took a sharper, more political turn. The Latin word originally meant a pact between parties, and it only grew into a broad policy under the Emperor Augustus with the famous Pax Romana. Crucially, the classical Roman idea assumed that peace had to be preceded by total victory imposed by the victors. Peace was the outcome of war, an enforced order, rather than its mere absence.

Order through strength versus order through agreement 🔗

The contrast here is important. While the Greeks generally restored peace through negotiated treaties rather than demanding total victory, the Roman model leaned heavily on dominance. Pax often meant submission to Roman superiority. This is the ancestor of a familiar modern idea: peace through strength. It is order maintained by a powerful authority, where stability matters more than whether all parties freely agree.

Interestingly, these traditions later blended. When the Hebrew scriptures were translated into Greek and then Latin, the rich, justice-laden meaning of Shalom flowed into Eirene and then into Pax, gradually transforming Pax from an imposed order of the sword into a deeper image of peace for Western Christianity. The words themselves carried ideas across cultures.

Shanti: peace as tranquility of mind 🔗

The Indian tradition shifts the focus inward. The Sanskrit word Shanti is derived from the root “sham” and signifies a profound state of spiritual and mental quietude. It is a central concept in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. Where Shalom emphasises justice and Pax emphasises order, Shanti emphasises the stillness that lies beneath the surface of the mind, the calm at the centre of the storm.

This inner orientation is captured in the well-known chant “Om Shanti Shanti Shanti.” Each of the three repetitions targets a different layer of disturbance: peace of the body, peace of the mind, and peace at the spiritual or cosmic level. Shanti is therefore a state of inner rather than outer peace, cultivated through practices like meditation and mindful living.

How inner peace connects to outer peace 🔗

It would be a mistake to read Shanti as purely self-centred. The tradition holds that inner peace and social peace are linked. The idea is that the more people realise inner peace, the sooner peace can emerge in society, so the inner path paves the way for the outer one. Shanti also connects closely to ahimsa, the principle of non-violence that runs through Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain thought. Jain philosophy in particular treats non-violence toward every living being as the foundation of a peaceful world. This gives the Indian conception a moral dimension that flows outward from a calm and disciplined self toward the wider world.

P’ing ho and Heiwa: peace as harmony and balance 🔗

The Chinese and Japanese traditions centre peace on harmony. In Chinese, the word for peace, heping (sometimes rendered as p’ing ho), is richer than the simple absence of war. It describes an active state of harmony, balance, and calm that can apply both to world politics and to resolving a personal disagreement without anger. The word joins “he,” meaning harmony, with “ping,” meaning balance or level.

This idea is deeply rooted in Confucian thought. For Confucius, peace was not valued simply as obedience for its own sake. Rather, he held that peace came from social harmony and equilibrium and was the ultimate human goal. Confucian peace is built on social order, achieved when individuals understand their place and practise self-restraint. It is, importantly, a harmony that grows from self-cultivation rather than one imposed purely by force.

The Japanese idea of Heiwa 🔗

The Japanese word Heiwa shares this heritage. Written with two kanji characters, it combines “hei,” meaning flat or calm, with “wa,” meaning harmony. The result is a concept of peace as balance maintained both within society and within oneself. In daily Japanese life, this shows up as an unspoken emphasis on avoiding conflict and preserving harmony in families, workplaces, and friendships. There is even a specific phrase, “kokoro no heiwa,” meaning peace of mind, which sits alongside the desire for world peace. Like Shanti, Heiwa weaves the inner and the outer together.

Bringing the traditions together 🔗

When we line these traditions up, a clear pattern appears. The Judaeo-Christian Shalom asks: is there justice? The Greek and Roman Eirene and Pax ask: is there order? The Indian Shanti asks: is there tranquility of mind? The Chinese and Japanese heping and Heiwa ask: is there harmony and balance? None of these questions is wrong. Each captures a genuine and necessary part of what peace requires.

This is where Galtung’s framework becomes useful again. His idea of positive peace explicitly includes the simultaneous presence of harmony, justice, and equity. In a sense, modern peace studies tries to gather what these older traditions kept separate. Galtung himself drew on Confucian thought, valuing its vision of harmony spreading outward from the self to the family, the community, and the wider civilisation.

Why this matters for global peace efforts 🔗

Recognising these cultural roots has real practical value. When peacebuilders, diplomats, and mediators work across borders, they often assume everyone shares the same definition of peace. They do not. A negotiator trained in the Roman tradition might push for a strong, enforced settlement, while a partner shaped by the Indian or Japanese tradition might prioritise restoring inner calm and relational harmony first. A community shaped by Shalom will insist that no settlement is real unless it delivers justice.

Lasting peace efforts work best when they integrate these values rather than imposing one over the others. A peace that has order but no justice is fragile. A peace that has inner calm but no fair structures is incomplete. By understanding that peace means justice in one tradition, order in another, tranquility in a third, and harmony in a fourth, we can design approaches that speak to all of them. This is not just academic. It is the difference between agreements that collapse within months and those that hold for generations.

What do you think? Which conception of peace feels closest to your own understanding, and why? And when these different visions of peace come into conflict during real-world negotiations, which value do you think should take priority: justice, order, harmony, or inner tranquility?

References

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3. https://shalomlc.org/hebrew-scriptures/shalom-the-hebrew-view-of-peace
4. https://firmisrael.org/learn/the-meaning-of-shalom/
5. https://www.theoi.com/Ouranios/HoraEirene.html
6. http://romanpagan.blogspot.com/2020/03/pax-and-roman-understanding-of-peace.html
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_peace_traditions
8. https://www.wisdomlib.org/names/shanti
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10. https://contextualchinese.com/%E5%92%8C%E5%B9%B3
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