Exploring the Relationship Between Peace and Violence

When most people hear the word “peace,” they picture the silence that follows a war-no gunfire, no soldiers, no bloodshed. But is the mere absence of fighting really enough to call a society peaceful? Peace and conflict scholars have spent decades arguing that this surface-level calm hides a deeper story. To truly understand peace, we have to understand its relationship with violence, including the kinds of violence that are quiet, invisible, and woven into the everyday workings of society. This is where thinkers like Johan Galtung, Kenneth Boulding, and Karl Deutsch reshaped how we think about both peace and violence.

Rethinking what peace actually means 🔗

For a long time, peace was defined in the simplest possible way: the absence of war. If two nations were not shooting at each other, they were said to be at peace. Peace studies challenged this narrow view. Scholars argued that peace is not just about stopping bullets-it is also about the presence of social and economic justice. A society can be free of open war and still be deeply unjust, with millions denied dignity, opportunity, and a fair life.

This shift in thinking gave the field two foundational concepts that remain central even today: negative peace and positive peace. Understanding the difference between them is the first step to grasping why peace and violence are so tightly linked.

Negative peace: the absence of war 🔗

Negative peace refers to the absence of direct, visible violence-no war, no physical attacks, no organized killing. The Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung, widely regarded as the founder of modern peace research, originally described negative peace as “the absence of violence, absence of war.” It is the calm we usually celebrate when a ceasefire is signed or a conflict ends.

But negative peace has a serious limitation. A society can stop fighting while still keeping huge sections of its population in poverty, exclusion, and humiliation. The guns may be silent, yet people may be suffering. Negative peace is useful in the short term because it stops bloodshed, but it does not address the root causes of conflict.

Positive peace: the presence of justice 🔗

Galtung argued that real peace requires something more-what he called positive peace. Positive peace is not just the absence of war but the presence of justice, cooperation, and the integration of human society. In his 1969 essay Violence, Peace, and Peace Research, Galtung identified positive peace mainly with “social justice.”

In this view, peace is a condition where people collaborate, support one another, and have genuine opportunities to realize their potential. According to scholars who trace his work, positive peace does not develop automatically-it must be deliberately built. Unjust situations have to be actively removed, and people must learn to cooperate even with former enemies. Negative peace can stop a war, but only positive peace can prevent the next one.

The hidden side of violence 🔗

If positive peace means the presence of justice, then its opposite is a kind of violence that does not involve any weapon at all. This is one of Galtung’s most influential contributions to the field: the idea that violence is much broader than physical harm. He divided violence into three interconnected types-direct, structural, and cultural.

Direct violence 🔗

Direct violence is the most obvious form. It involves a clear actor who intends to harm a clear victim-a soldier shooting a civilian, a riot, an assault, or a war. We can easily see it, name it, and assign responsibility for it. Because it is visible and dramatic, it tends to dominate news headlines and public attention.

Structural violence 🔗

Structural violence is far subtler and, in many ways, far deadlier. Galtung used this term to describe harm that is “built into the structure” of society and shows up as unequal power and unequal life chances. There is no single villain pulling a trigger. Instead, the harm is produced by the way social, economic, and political systems are organized.

Galtung captured this idea with a striking comparison: when one husband beats his wife it is personal violence, but when a million wives are kept in ignorance, that is structural violence. The caste system offers one of the clearest examples. Despite constitutional guarantees of equality, Dalits and other marginalized communities continue to face systematic disadvantages in education, employment, and social life. When poverty, discrimination, and exclusion cut lives short and crush opportunity, structural violence is at work-even if no one is openly attacked.

This form of violence is dangerous precisely because it is normalized. People often treat poverty, caste discrimination, or gender inequality as unfortunate but unavoidable parts of life, rather than as forms of violence that demand action. Anthropological studies of poverty and bureaucracy in India have described the relationship between the state and the poor as one of structural violence that kills millions every year, especially women, lower-caste groups, and indigenous peoples.

Cultural violence 🔗

The third type, cultural violence, refers to the aspects of culture-religion, ideology, language, art, and tradition-that are used to justify or legitimize direct and structural violence. When a belief system teaches that some people are naturally inferior, it makes their oppression seem acceptable or even natural. Cultural violence is what allows the other two forms to persist without serious challenge. Notions of ritual purity and pollution that prop up caste hierarchy, or norms that treat women as subordinate, are examples of culture being used to legitimize harm.

Galtung saw these three forms as feeding into one another in a vicious cycle: cultural violence justifies structural violence, which in turn erupts into direct violence. Breaking this cycle, he argued, requires building peace at every level-cultural, structural, and direct.

The Galtung-Boulding debate 🔗

Galtung’s expansive view of violence did not go unchallenged. One of the most important debates in peace studies took place between Galtung and the economist Kenneth Boulding, who exchanged arguments in the academic literature. Boulding’s famous critique appeared in an essay titled “Twelve Friendly Quarrels with Johan Galtung,” to which Galtung later replied with “Only One Quarrel with Kenneth Boulding.”

Boulding worried that stretching the definition of violence to include almost every form of social injustice made the concept too vague to be useful. He even approvingly cited a reviewer who joked that Galtung seemed to “define structural violence as anything that Galtung didn’t like.” Boulding feared that this maximalist approach turned peace into an unreachable, idealistic goal.

Stable peace as an alternative 🔗

Boulding offered his own concept: stable peace. He imagined a continuum stretching from stable war to stable peace. In his framework, stable peace exists when the possibility of violent confrontation between states is so low that it is essentially disregarded in their planning. Importantly, Boulding believed stable peace does not require resolving every underlying conflict or eliminating every injustice-it simply requires that disputes are no longer settled through force.

This was a more modest and arguably more achievable target than Galtung’s positive peace. Where Galtung insisted that genuine peace demanded the dismantling of exploitation and repression, Boulding focused on making war unthinkable. The disagreement was not trivial; it reflected a deeper question about how ambitious peace research should be.

Can peace coexist with repression? 🔗

This debate points to one of the most uncomfortable truths in peace studies: a society can look peaceful while remaining deeply repressive. Imagine a country with no wars and no street violence, yet ruled by an authoritarian government that silences dissent and keeps entire communities in poverty. By the standard of negative peace, it is peaceful. By the standard of positive peace, it is anything but.

This is exactly why Galtung’s framework matters. It forces us to ask whether the calm we observe is genuine peace or merely the silence of the oppressed. Peace maintained through fear, surveillance, or systematic inequality is not the same as peace built on justice. Recognizing this distinction is essential for anyone trying to evaluate whether a society is truly at peace or simply suppressing the symptoms of conflict.

Karl Deutsch and the idea of peaceful change 🔗

If Galtung and Boulding helped us understand what peace is, the political scientist Karl Deutsch helped explain how it can be sustained between nations. In his 1957 study Political Community and the North Atlantic Area, Deutsch and his collaborators introduced the concept of a security community.

A security community is a group of states so closely integrated that large-scale violence such as war has become very unlikely or even unthinkable among them. The members share a “sense of community”-mutual trust, common interests, and a belief that their shared problems can be solved through cooperation rather than force.

Peaceful change as the foundation 🔗

At the heart of Deutsch’s idea is the concept of peaceful change, which he defined as the creation of dependable “expectations of peaceful change” among peoples. In other words, what holds a security community together is the shared confidence that disputes will be resolved through institutionalized, non-violent procedures rather than military force.

Deutsch distinguished between two kinds of security communities. In an amalgamated community, states formally merge into a single government, while in a pluralistic community, states keep their sovereignty but still trust one another not to use force. Both rest on the same foundation: the firm expectation of peaceful change. Deutsch argued that economic and cultural cooperation was a far better route toward building such a community than common membership in a military alliance.

This insight connects directly back to Galtung. A security community is, in a sense, an example of positive peace operating between nations. Peace is sustained not by the threat of retaliation but by genuine integration, communication, and trust-the active presence of cooperation rather than the mere absence of war.

Why this relationship matters today 🔗

Bringing these thinkers together reveals a clear picture: peace and violence are not simple opposites where one ends and the other begins. Violence can be loud and direct, or silent and structural. Peace can be a fragile ceasefire or a deeply rooted condition of justice. A society can appear calm while quietly harming millions through its very structures.

For a country grappling with inequality, caste discrimination, and communal tension, these frameworks are not just academic. They offer a practical lens for asking the right questions. Is our peace genuine, or are we simply tolerating injustice that has been normalized? Are we building the institutions and trust that make peaceful change dependable? Real peace, as these scholars remind us, is never just the silence after the storm-it is the hard, ongoing work of building justice.

What do you think? Can a society that maintains order through systemic inequality ever be considered truly peaceful, or is that simply violence in disguise? And which approach do you find more convincing for the world today-Galtung’s demand for full social justice, or Boulding’s more achievable goal of making war unthinkable?

References

1. https://www.transcend.org/tms/2024/07/johan-galtung-positive-and-negative-peace/
2. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/002234336900600301
3. https://philosophybytheway.blogspot.com/2024/02/johan-galtung-1930-2024.html
4. https://espace-mondial-atlas.sciencespo.fr/en/topic-insecuritypeace/article-4A08-EN-positive-and-sustainable-peace.html
5. https://divinity.uchicago.edu/sightings/articles/structural-violence-headlines
6. https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/1607/Red-TapeBureaucracy-Structural-Violence-and
7. https://commons.lib.jmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1019&context=ijr
8. https://www.marketsandsociety.org/v1i2/continuing-relevance-stable-peace
9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_community
10. https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/10269/chapter/5
11. https://www.bartleby.com/essay/Karl-Deutschs-Theory-Of-The-Security-Community-FCQB537BN6