Yes, what is it?–let
us start this New Year on a positive note. Keeping in mind that peace is an
honor word, like health, salvation for many: a focus of dreams and wishes, a
summum bonum that should be both very precise and amenable to professional
peace work and kept open, filled with new dreams and aspirations. Like for
health, new aspects come up all the time; for instance in positive psychology.
Peace presupposes
absence, or low level, of violence, direct as well as structural, and of the
cultural violence justifying the other two. But we can also go for a more
limited concept: absence of direct violence, of killing and wounding with arms,
hurting with words. And we should include the absence of the attitudinal side
of that, hatred.
All these absences,
or low levels we can live with, like mild diseases–myopia, having a cold–add up
to negative peace. Peace as absence. Not to be scorned at in any way, but only
a step to peace. The typical case would be two states having nothing to do with
each other; whether because they never did or decided better so, like a couple
separating or divorcing. Another typical case would be real armistice,
ceasefire not used to smuggle in arms or combatant rest, for redeployment.
“Passive co-existence” covers negative peace quite well.
But any theory of
peace has to go beyond that, at the micro level within-between persons; meso between
social groups across faultlines; macro between states, nations; mega between
regions, civilizations. And yet peace is an almost uncharted territory. Many
rest content with the formula “win-win”, but that only means that they achieved
the goals in the underlying conflicts, nothing more, nothing less.
Violence means that
something bad is flowing between parties hurting each other; negative peace
that nothing is flowing; positive peace that something good is flowing between
parties being good to each other. I have found these five levels of positive
peace fruitful.
Equity, cooperating
for mutual and equal benefit, aka friendship;
Harmony, sharing joys
and sorrows, high on empathy, aka love;
Organization of
equity-harmony, aka transcendence-institution;
Fusion, total peace,
aka pax omnium cum omnibus, sui generis;
Afterlife, in others,
in Heaven, aka as Mutual Assured Bliss, MAB.
European countries
start cooperating after centuries of warfare; then feeling for each other; then comes Community
(Council, Commission) as institutions solidifying equity-harmony; then Europe
as an overarching actor accommodating member states peacefully; then inspiring
others.
At the micro-level it
starts as friendship from cooperation, love from shared concerns, sealed in marriage,
over age the partners may fuse into one actor, the couple, then living on in
the progeny.
Correspondingly,
working with five levels of violence may also be fruitful, in the usual sense
of generating theory and practice:
Violence, harming
Other; with polarization and dominance relations;
Hatred, sorrow at the
joy of Other, joy at the sorrow of Other;
Organization of
violence-hatred, aka transcendence-institution, war;
Fusion, total war,
aka bellum omnium contra omnes, sui generis;
Afterlife, in others,
in Hell; as Mutual Assured Destruction, MAD.
The violence can be
structural: War = Misery, Total war = starvation.
The building blocks
for positive peace are friendship and love, for war violence and hatred; one
behavioral, one attitudinal. Generally
friendship precedes love and violence precedes hatred; but there is “love at
first sight” and no doubt “hatred at first sight” maybe because of so much of
either that only an object is needed. We may talk about a behavioral, or
attitudinal, road to peace and war.
Underlying violence
is contradiction, incompatibility, conflict; solving, transforming that
conflict is crucial for violence reduction.
Underlying peace is
“condition”, compatibility of goals; creating that condition is crucial for
building ever more peace.
The next three stages
take violence and peace to higher levels.
Organization:
something new transcending, institutionalizing, solidifying the two components:
a community, a marriage, for peace at macro and micro levels; a war for
violence, at all levels.
Fusion: a new actor,
of its own kind, sui generis, is born: Europe, the couple, for lasting peace
among the parties: the Hobbesian state of affairs for lasting war, approximated
by security-oriented, paranoid states–not as Hobbes’ state of nature–and
egocentrism.
Afterlife: with a
secular interpretation as merits-demerits humans leave behind in others, like
parents passing to their offspring patterns of peace or war as dominos through
time; with a religious interpretation as life in the thereafter, as peace in
Heaven, and as violence in Hell. A peace concept should accommodate both.
What a range from MAD
to MAB, and humans are capable of it all! From negative peace down to
violence-hatred, or up to friendship-love. Institutionalized, friendship-love
as peace, violence-hatred as war. Then, fusing in space, into a new actor or
general state of affairs. And fusing in time through chains of positive or
negative inspiration, eternalizing as Heaven and Hell, Nirvana or Samsara. As
MAB and MAD.
We sense a problem:
institutionalization–as organization or at a higher level as fusion–may take
the freshness out of friendship-love, and also out of violence-hatred. The
latter is often intended: being anti-human to victims and most perpetrators,
institutionalization may be needed to sustain violence and hatred (like
officers walking behind to kill their own soldiers trying to escape). And we
sense parties in love wanting to live together without the seal of
institutionalized marriage and states preferring identity to region absorption,
vide EU. But organization may be useful, fusion may happen, afterlife is life.
The peace formula
uses equity and harmony, adding at all points
Equity
X Harmony
Peace = —————–
Trauma
X Conflict
on the complex
non-linear road from war to peace, from MAD to MAB: for traumas: conciliation,
for conflicts: solution; with depolarization, de-domination. Idealism and
professionalism, hand in hand.
Johan Galtung.
Fundador de los Estudios científicos sobre la Paz. Director de Transcend: A
Peace and Development Network y Rector de la Transcend Peace University. Ganador del Premio Nobel Alternativo de la Paz en 1987 y el Premio Gandhi en
1993. Autor de más de 50 libros y más de 1,000 artículos publicados.
Johan Galtung. Trascend.org. 05/01/15