When we hear the word “peace,” most of us picture a world without war-no bombs, no riots, no bloodshed. But peace researchers argue that this picture is incomplete. A society can have no active war and still be deeply unjust, where millions suffer from poverty, discrimination, and hunger that are entirely preventable. To capture this difference, the Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung, widely regarded as the founder of modern peace studies, gave us two of the most influential concepts in the field: negative peace and positive peace. Understanding the distinction between them is essential for anyone studying conflict resolution, because it changes how we define a “peaceful” society in the first place.
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What is negative peace?
Negative peace is the simplest and most common understanding of peace. It refers to the absence of direct, organised violence-the kind of violence we can see, such as war, terrorism, armed conflict, and physical assault. When a ceasefire is signed or a war ends, what follows is negative peace.
Galtung introduced this idea in 1964 in the very first issue of the Journal of Peace Research, describing negative peace simply as the “absence of violence, absence of war.” By 1967, he sharpened this further, defining it as the absence of organised, collective violence between large groups of people such as nations, classes, races, and ethnic groups.
The word “negative” here is not a judgement that this kind of peace is bad. It simply means peace defined by what is missing-violence is removed, but nothing positive has necessarily been added in its place. Two countries that stop shooting at each other have achieved negative peace, even if hostility, suspicion, and the underlying causes of their conflict remain untouched.
Why negative peace is not enough
The limitation of negative peace becomes obvious when we look beyond the battlefield. A society can be free of war while remaining riddled with injustice. Imagine a community where a particular caste or group is systematically denied education, healthcare, and economic opportunity. There may be no riots on the streets, but the suffering is real and ongoing.
The American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. captured this perfectly. He argued that the segregated American South had only a “sort of negative peace” in which oppressed communities accepted their subordination. For him, this was not true peace at all, because true peace requires the presence of justice-not merely the absence of tension. This insight points us directly toward the second, deeper concept.
What is positive peace?
Positive peace is the absence of structural violence-and, more ambitiously, the presence of the attitudes, institutions, and structures that create and sustain peaceful societies. While negative peace asks “Is there violence?”, positive peace asks “Is there justice?”
Galtung increasingly identified positive peace with social justice. In his early writing he described it as the “integration of human society”-a situation in which people cooperate with and support one another. Over time, especially in his landmark 1969 essay, he tied positive peace explicitly to the elimination of structural violence. To understand positive peace, then, we first need to understand what structural violence actually means.
Understanding structural violence
This is Galtung’s most original contribution. Direct violence has a clear actor-someone who pulls a trigger or throws a punch. But structural violence has no single, identifiable perpetrator. It is harm that is built into the structure of a society and shows up as unequal power and, consequently, unequal life chances.
Galtung gave a striking illustration of the difference. When one husband beats his wife, that is direct, personal violence-visible and traceable. But when a million people are kept in ignorance, poverty, or ill health by the way society is organised, that is structural violence. The crucial point is this: if people are starving when this is objectively avoidable, then violence is being committed-even though no one is directly “attacking” them.
Structural violence appears in many forms familiar to anyone studying society today: deep economic inequality, lack of access to education and medical care, discrimination based on caste, religion, gender, or ethnicity, and the political repression through which the powerful secure benefits at the expense of those with less power. It is precisely this kind of violence that distinguishes negative peace from positive peace.
The violence triangle
In his later work, Galtung expanded his framework into what is often called the violence triangle, adding a third category to direct and structural violence: cultural violence. This refers to those aspects of a culture-religion, ideology, language, art, science-that can be used to justify or legitimise both direct and structural violence.
For example, a belief system that treats one group as inherently inferior makes their oppression seem normal or even natural. Galtung argued that lasting peace comes from breaking the vicious cycle of violence and replacing it with a virtuous cycle-flowing from cultural peace through structural peace to direct peace. Achieving all three is what genuine positive peace looks like.
Positive peace as a set of building blocks
If positive peace is about building just structures rather than simply stopping violence, what does that look like in practice? The Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), an independent think tank, has turned Galtung’s idea into a measurable framework. It defines positive peace as the attitudes, structures, and institutions that underpin and sustain peaceful societies, and measures it through the Positive Peace Index across 163 countries.
The IEP identifies eight Pillars of Positive Peace–socio-economic factors most strongly correlated with peaceful, resilient societies. According to the IEP framework, these are:
Well-functioning government that delivers quality public services and political stability. Equitable distribution of resources so that opportunity is not concentrated among a few. Free flow of information through independent and accessible media. Good relations with neighbours, both internally and with other states. High levels of human capital, built through education and skills. Acceptance of the rights of others, including tolerance across groups. Low levels of corruption, which build trust in institutions. And a sound business environment that supports economic productivity.
What makes this framework powerful is that these pillars are interconnected and mutually reinforcing-strengthening one tends to strengthen the others. A society high in positive peace is also more resilient, recovering faster from political, economic, or environmental shocks. This is why positive peace is described not just as a goal but as a theory of how societies actually thrive.
Negative and positive peace in the Indian context
The distinction is not merely theoretical. Consider how a nation can perform very differently on these two dimensions. India ranked 115th out of 163 countries on the Global Peace Index in 2025, a measure heavily shaped by levels of direct violence, internal conflict, and militarisation. That figure tells us about the negative-peace dimension.
The positive-peace picture is told by different numbers. Around 234 million people were estimated to live in multidimensional poverty according to the 2024 Global Multidimensional Poverty Index-deprived not by war, but by gaps in nutrition, education, and basic services. These are textbook examples of structural violence: avoidable suffering produced by how resources and opportunities are distributed.
Research within India reinforces the point. A study published in a peer-reviewed journal found that socio-economic status strongly shapes who experiences violence and neglect, with disadvantaged groups bearing a heavier burden. Building positive peace here would mean strengthening exactly the kind of pillars the IEP describes-reducing inequality, improving human capital, and ensuring institutions work fairly for everyone.
Why both concepts matter for lasting peace
It would be a mistake to treat negative peace as worthless and positive peace as the only thing that counts. Galtung himself stressed that these are two separate dimensions, and one can exist without the other. Stopping a war saves lives immediately, even if injustice persists. Negative peace is often the necessary first step.
The danger lies in stopping there. A peace that only silences the guns while leaving structural violence intact is fragile. The roots of conflict-inequality, exclusion, repression-remain alive, and violence can easily erupt again. This is why peace researchers note that consensus is far easier to reach on negative peace, since simply ending visible fighting is less controversial than redistributing power and resources.
Positive peace, by contrast, does not appear automatically once the fighting stops. As Galtung emphasised, it must be deliberately built-unjust structures must be purposefully dismantled, and former enemies must learn to cooperate. This is the heart of peace building: moving a society beyond the mere absence of war toward the active presence of justice. Comprehensive and lasting peace therefore requires both dimensions working together-removing direct violence while simultaneously constructing the structures that make a return to violence unnecessary.
What do you think? Is it ever justified for a government to prioritise negative peace-simply stopping violence-over the slower, harder work of building positive peace? And in your own community, which forms of structural violence do you think are most often mistaken for “peace” simply because they are invisible?
References
- https://www.transcend.org/tms/2024/06/on-johan-galtungs-approach-to-peace-studies/
- https://espace-mondial-atlas.sciencespo.fr/en/topic-insecuritypeace/article-4A08-EN-positive-and-sustainable-peace.html
- https://www2.hawaii.edu/~kent/StructuralViolenceFestschrift.pdf
- https://philosophybytheway.blogspot.com/2024/02/johan-galtung-1930-2024.html
- https://www.academia.edu/744030/Johan_Galtung_Positive_and_Negative_Peace
- https://www.economicsandpeace.org/research/
- https://www.isdglobal.org/digital_dispatches/long-term-positive-peace-trends-in-three-charts/
- https://reliefweb.int/report/world/positive-peace-report-2024-analysing-factors-build-predict-and-sustain-peace
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_rankings_of_India
- https://theiashub.com/upsc/indias-ranking-in-different-indexes/
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8135164/
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