As Peace, am I not praised by both men and gods as the very source and defender of all good things? What is there of prosperity, of security, or of happiness that cannot be ascribed to me? On the other hand, is not war the destroyer of all things and the very seed of evil?
Desiderius Erasmus, The Complaint of Peace
Defining peace and its dimensions is a difficult task. There is no single definition. A starting point is to think in terms of a narrow version, which implies the ending of violence but not resolving its underlying causes. The current situation in Cyprus where Greek and Turkish Cypriot military forces, or Korea where North and South Korean forces, confront each other daily across a demilitarized line might be described as peace, according to this framework. By contrast a broad version would produce a peace agreement, peaceful state, and society according to a single universal model. The European Union’s emergence from the ruins of World War II might be an example, where very similar states have emerged. Finally, multiple versions of peace would imply the coexistence, but simultaneous agreement to differ, of very different social and political systems. Perhaps the peace agreement between Egypt and Israel in 1978 is a good example of this approach, in which very different states and their population, with many remaining and deep disagreements and difference, are reconciled, to a limited degree. Another example is offered by the form of peace that is emerging in Timor Leste since the Indonesian occupation ended in 1999. This partly follows the model offered by the modern state, in which democracy, law, human rights, and development provide a framework in which conflicts are managed by institutions, law, and increased prosperity. It is also combined with very different customs and systems of authority that exist at the community level, including customary forms of governance and processes of conflict resolution, including those historically used by elders, long-standing customary law, and well-known traditional reconciliation ceremonies called ‘Tara bandu’. In 2013, the country’s President recognized the important of these approaches, especially as they are closer to the population’s culture than the modern state is, and the Timorese parliament is debating the possibility of incorporating these cultural resolution practices into the formal legal system.
Each of these versions of peace offers different levels of security and rights for society: a narrow version would be basic but relatively insecure, a broader version more complex but also more sustainable, and a multiple approach even more complex but stable. Underlying each type is a central question: does one make peace by subjugating one’s enemies, assimilating them by converting them into something similar to the dominant group, or by accepting, and thus becoming reconciled to their difference?
According to Johan Galtung, one of the founders of modern peace studies, a ‘negative peace’ is the aim of narrow versions (which would be a good description of the failed peace treaty after World War I), a ‘positive peace’ the aim of broader versions (which may well explain the European Peace after World War II). A more recent concept, a ‘hybrid peace’, is the amalgam of multiple approaches (as may be emerging in places such as Timor Leste or Kosovo after the conflicts there in the late 1990s). A narrow understanding of peace indicates an absence of overt violence (such as warfare or low-intensity conflict) both between and within states. This may take the form of a ceasefire, a power-sharing agreement, or exist within an authoritarian political system. It indicates that one state, or group in society, dominates another through violence or more subtle means. This approach has the benefit of simplicity, but a negative peace will always be fragile because it is based on ever-shifting configurations of power in the international system or within the state. Hidden, so-called ‘structural violence’ embedded in social, economic, and political systems remains unaddressed. This might explain why, after various ceasefires in the 2000s, the peace process has collapsed in Colombia on several occasions, because the core issues of the dispute, in particular relating to land distribution, poverty, and socio-economic inequality, have not as yet been addressed. A peace agreement based on a narrow understanding of peace would probably not be satisfactory in anything other than the short term. Military force or an authoritarian government may maintain a basic security order—as in East Germany during the Cold War—but many deficits relating to human rights, democratic representation, and prosperity remain.
These remaining issues are markers of structural violence—meaning the indirect violence that is created by oppressive structures of government, of law, bureaucracy, trade, resource distribution, social class, or because of poverty or environmental problems. Sometimes structural violence can occur even in relatively peaceful societies.
A negative understanding of peace draws on an ‘inherency’ view of conflict. That is, violence is intrinsic to human nature, is part of our biology, and thus is endemic in society, history, and amongst states at the international level. Such an argument is often drawn from observations of how animals appear to behave, particularly primates (though the applicability of such evidence is much disputed). Negative peace may also refer to the tensions that global capitalism produces for societies disrupted by its ‘creative destruction’. Little can be done about it other than to try to curb its worst excesses. It is easy to agree with such a position when taking a view of history that focuses only on its most visible and often violent moments, such as international or civil wars.
If conflict is endemic because it is rooted in human nature then little can be done about it other than using force to promote strategic interests. This represents a conservative and somewhat old-fashioned view of the politics of peace and war. Security in these terms means the preservation of a pre-existing hierarchy of states, their territorial sovereignty, and a balance of power between them—as in 19th century Europe and the ‘Concert System’ post-1815. This was the attitude toward war and conflict and their relationship with a negative peace (with honourable exceptions) from ancient times until at least the Enlightenment, perhaps even until the emergence of fascism in the early 20th century. Peace existed (somewhat conveniently for, and from, the perspective of kings, queens, emperors, and various dictators) mainly as a painful stalemate between rulers, or absolute victory, in between the frequent wars that took place across history. In this history, human beings are merely pawns of the powerful and their interests. Such views have slowly been supplanted by positive peace approaches since the Enlightenment.
A broader understanding of peace indicates both the lack of open violence between and within states, and the aim of creating the conditions for society to live without fear or poverty, within a broadly agreed political system. It implies the relative fulfilment of individuals in society, as well as stable political institutions, law, economics, states, and regions. It represents the proverbial ‘good life’ or the ‘Perpetual Peace’ to which famous philosophers from Aristotle (384–322 BC) to Immanuel Kant, a German liberal philosopher (1724–1804), have often alluded. Much of the post-Enlightenment political history, especially since the Treaty of Westphalia brought peace to a large part of Europe in 1648,reflects an attempt to develop a scientific conceptualization of peace in positive terms.
Thus, it may well be a myth that conflict is inherent in human nature. This negative peace story is propagated through the flawed observation of primate violence and Darwinian assumptions that human nature follows the same pattern. Such social-Darwinist arguments work in the interests of those who control resources and power—a conservative and elitist grouping. By contrast, even in the animal world, primates display impulses of social order and peacemaking. So it is possible to claim that in fact peacemaking has been the most common activity of humanity in history. As every society has experienced conflict on various levels, all societies have developed sophisticated methods for peacemaking—from social institutions to formal legal processes and public government institutions. Contrary to the inherency view, conflict and war are learned behaviours. Human action can prevent or mitigate conflict through institutions, compromise, agreement, redistribution of resources, and education. This view has shaped the attempt during the 20th century to build a positive peace, defined as long-term stability, sustainability, and social justice. From this understanding developed mediation, as used by US President Carter after the 1974 war in the Middle East between Egypt and Israel, peacekeeping as in Cyprus, Congo, and many other countries, conflict resolution and transformation now widely used at the civil society level, and peacebuilding as used from Cambodia to Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s. Such strategies have often been based on security guarantees, such as by the USA or NATO.
A public or official narrative of history tends to be dominated by elites (kings, queens, emperors, politicians, the military, religious figures, the very rich, and, more often, men). However, there is also a private transcript of everyday history that offers a more nuanced understanding of human history and society. In this private transcript, a positive peace becomes visible as located in everyday life—perhaps akin to Aristotle’s ‘good life’. This social and ‘natural’ peacemaking tendency may be less visible than the ruptures caused by violence but nonetheless it represents the business of everyday life and contributions to the development of political and international institutions—from parliaments to the UN system.
From this perspective, contemporary developments in thinking about peace have moved far beyond a negative peace towards an investigation of what an emancipatory, everyday, empathetic form might look like in specific social contexts around the world (from Afghanistan to Liberia, for example) as well as in the architecture of the contemporary international system. This has engendered a shift from traditional notions of security where the onus was on the state to secure its territory and sovereignty, as Max Weber (1864–1920), one of the founders of sociology, argued. This view has also been replaced more recently by a version of security where human beings, rather than the state, are the main focus.
A positive peace, along with concepts such as ‘human security’ (which in 1994 was defined by a UN Development Programme official as ‘freedom from fear, freedom from want’), would be a higher priority than state security, and arguments that violence is learned rather than innate in society imply that conflict may be mutually and consensually resolved. Thus, a broad and inclusive form of peace may arise. Direct and structural violence can be removed. This peace is acceptable in everyday terms to ordinary people, not only to political and economic elites according to their interests. Such a situation transcends basic security concerns over power, territory, and material resources and offers a peace that is akin to the everyday lives that many people experience in developed liberal democracies, in which security, law, order, and prosperity are comparatively and relatively routine. Under such conditions social justice—human rights, democratic representation, relative material equality, and prosperity—the accountability of states and elites, as well as peace between states may be achieved.
Such a high-quality version of peace has rarely been achieved after war, unless in a longer-term perspective, as with most of the affected countries after World War II. This view rejects the argument that conflict is inherent in human nature and hence in states and institutions, but maintains instead that conflict can be resolved fully by people, states, and institutions. Human beings have the capacity to understand why conflict arises and to develop a range of innovative responses to it. These peace-oriented humans are not subjects of the powerful, but are politically engaged in local, everyday as well as transnational or international peace campaigns, institutions, and architectures. The significance of such an approach lies in its assumption that the nature and causes of conflict stem from many different dynamics. These may include social, economic, politic, military, and resource dynamics, such as identity, class, or ethnic differences, unfair, weak, and unrepresentative political institutions, or contests over resources such as land, oil, minerals, or labour.
Such multiple and entwined causes require multidimensional and sophisticated responses, if conflict is to be resolved. Because of this line of thought, the disciplines of international relations, political science, peace and conflict research, as well as law, sociology, anthropology, development, and economics, have all become essential to a more comprehensive understanding of the necessary conditions of peace in modern times.
The concept of a positive peace has been significant in policy terms because it reflects the growing demands of populations for their rights and needs to be met, and for essential public services to be provided in order to transcend the identity, religious, material, ideological, and territorial differences that have historically often sparked violence. It influences how conflict is understood and addressed by states and by various international or regional organizations: the UN, World Bank, and international donors or governments especially those of the OECD and G20, as well as the European Union. It provides essential ‘navigation points for policy’ whereby they are able to satisfy their electorates and citizens.
A further alternative to positive peace is that there exist multiple conceptions of peace across the range of cultures, states, and societies around the world. Most societies, however ‘modern’ or ‘traditional’, have their own version. These often engender different, or at least nuanced, notions of social harmony, economic prosperity, political institutions, and law, as well as respect for historical traditions and identity. Enabling coexistence between different entities practising different forms of peace would require mediation between them and cooperation at the social, state, and international level. This is most probably the next threshold for peace theory and practices to cross in their search for ever more advanced forms.
However peace is defined, it has always attracted innovative or radical thought, action (often heroic in nature), and has led to improved institutions and practices. Although there have been sophisticated intellectual debates about peace throughout history, peace has also often been defined by power rather than justice.
The history of peace in Western and often ‘Eurocentric’ thought spans the thought of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato to the emergence of NATO after World War II, the recent history of European integration, and its attempts to develop regional cooperation between former enemies. Over the years of its existence, the UN (often through the General Assembly or its many agencies) has compiled and released documents, reports, and resolutions resting on a wide global consensus. These have pointed to strategies designed to deal with the adverse connection between power and peace: from its programmes for ‘cultures of peace’, rights to peace, on the need for ‘new economic orders’, economic, social and cultural rights, to independence, self-determination, development, and peacebuilding. These all called for equality in identity and gender terms, self-determination, participation, cooperation, social justice, and development. They have endorsed a right to culture, society, and work, and to choose one’s own identity. They have called for an international states-system framed in the interests of positive, rather than negative, peace, interests, or power. Representatives of much of the planet’s population signed these documents, yet such global political and scientific consensus has been easily forgotten. Thus, the evolution of peace has been slow, and rather than a single, positive, universal peace emerging, this process appears to be leading to an interlocking system of multiple ‘peaces’. In its most simple terms this might be seen in the wide varieties of states that currently coexist: from Western liberal democracies, to China’s authoritarian capitalism, the Gulf States, or the many developing democracies containing populations with widely different configurations of identity and religion, including Brazil, South Africa, and the likes of Sri Lanka, Cambodia, or Colombia.
In the contemporary era, more active terms such as ‘peacebuilding’, ‘conflict resolution’, and ‘statebuilding’ are often used interchangeably, especially by scholars and policymakers, with the word ‘peace’. The modern concept of peace has broadened from the mere absence of violence. Within the UN system policymakers generally agree that they should try to address the root causes of conflict. Peace has also been associated with active resistance to subtle forms of domination, as well as to the inequalities that global capitalism often produces (especially because extractive multinational corporations (MNCs) are often the first businesses to arrive in post-conflict countries after a peace agreement, to exploit the country’s natural resources).
There are untold disruptions present but unrecognized in all of our lives because of past wars. Yet, the story of peace is more pervasive in terms of the measure of time that humanity has experienced it. Peacetime involves not just the absence of violence but also the mundanities of everyday life. To an eye trained to look for military conflict these aspects of peace may be inconsequential. Peace’s broader aspects, which St Augustine, the Latin theologian of the 4th–5th centuries AD, called the ‘tranquillity of order’, are often taken for granted. Peace is the most long-term aspect of human experience, even if it may appear or feel banal, everyday, and ordinary.
Several important lines of thought converge in theoretical approaches to peace: one focused on the constitution of the state, another on the role of international organizations, another on the underlying philosophy of peace, and another on social peace movements emerging from society. Peace also has had religious connotations, arising from the way different religions treat violence and promote tolerance throughout history. Such views span concepts such as ‘just war’, self-defence, non-violence, and pacifism, drawing on Christian, Buddhist, and Hindu philosophy.
Some general theories, dynamics, and themes prominent in the historical discussion of peace reappear in theory. The best-known approach in political theory is called political realism. Contributors include authors such as Sun Tzu (an ancient Chinese military strategist and philosopher who was the author of The Art of War in the 6th century BC), Thucydides (an ancient Greek historian from the 5th century BC, who because of his experiences in the Peloponnesian War between Sparta and Athens claimed that power rather than morality was important in war), and Augustine (a Latin philosopher and theologian during the late Roman Empire in the 5th century AD). Realism mainly focuses on the military (and later on economic) power of states.
Machiavelli, an Italian historian, politician, diplomat, and philosopher based in Florence during the Renaissance, worried that peace might lead to disorder, requiring a military response (in his famous book The Prince, published around 1532):
A wise prince ought to observe some such rules, and never in peaceful times stand idle, but increase his resources with industry in such a way that they may be available to him in adversity, so that if fortune changes it may find him prepared to resist her blows. (Chapter XIV)
Nevertheless, the common view that the ancient period was defined by an acceptance of the inevitability of war is perhaps mistaken. Even Machiavelli, more often associated with power and interests, thought that elections were necessary and peace should be fair and voluntary.
Later, in Enlightenment philosophy, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) set out social contract theory, including the need for political representation, individual rights, and notions of civil society. Drawing on his experience of the English civil war, Hobbes argued for a social contract between the population and an absolute sovereign (called a Leviathan after a biblical monster). He thought that a ‘war of all against all’ required a Leviathan in the form of a strong central government.
Peace was understood in a relatively narrow way in realist thought, in which it was defined by merely the absence of open violence. However, structural violence might be present. Key modern scholars and policy figures in this tradition like Henry Kissinger (born in 1923, a scholar and Secretary of State for Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford), influenced by experiences in World War II and during the Cold War, often see peace mainly as a balance of power between states.
Another important approach draws on ancient critiques of militarism, following those of Confucius (a 6th century BC Chinese philosopher), that war would not give rise to peace. Government should focus on the well-being of the people, not on making war. Given the legitimacy and attractiveness of peace, it has often been central to any civilization’s narrative about its place in the world. In the case of China, Confucius himself said that ‘pacific harmony’ bound society together. He offered his famous aphorism that peace extended from the heart to the family, then to society, and to the world. Daoism also connected inner, social, and collective harmony, which also incidentally required a norm of non-interference. Even during the Warring States period of Chinese history, famous voices decried war (and the realist propositions of Sun Tzu) in favour of the merits of peace. Confucius’ focus on ‘civil virtues’ was the most famous of these: among other wise statements, he argued in his book Analects, ‘… [r]ecompense injury with justice, and recompense kindness with kindness’. His work has more recently been reclaimed as an emblem of modern China’s ‘peaceful development’.
From classical Greece to ancient China, war was a disruption of a ‘natural’ and peaceful order, rather than the other way around. Respect, civil virtue, neighbourliness, cooperation, morality, trade, good governance, kinship, and treaties are motifs of early representations of peace. Another characteristic of early thinking on peace was the relationship with government and citizens, from Plato onwards. Peace is in the interests of a ‘philosopher-king’ who exercises his judgement for the good of all, however difficult this may be, according to Plato’s Republic. In addition, in ancient Greek philosophy around the 3rd century BC, the Epicureans crystallized a growing concern with everyday conditions for ordinary people, and the Stoics rejected the passions of greed, anger, or lust, calling for self-discipline and solidarity. Even at this early stage, individuals were mobilizing for peace, realizing that their local and social environment was crucial, that peace required different types of approaches, and that it had an international dimension.
These approaches were associated with issues of abundance and dignity (as with the Greek goddess Eirene, who was the personification of peace, often depicted in art as a beautiful young daughter of Zeus carrying a cornucopia). They also suggested a rejection of war through various strategies, as exemplified in Aristophanes’ comic play Lysistrata. Eventually there emerged a historical build-up of diplomatic peace treaties in ancient Greece reflecting such understandings, which became ever more refined and widespread, aiming at creating a ‘common peace’.
Another contribution to this process drew on the thinking of the Christian philosopher Augustine, who himself reflected a longer historical tradition. This is known as ‘just war’. In his book Summa Theologica, Augustine wrote:
A just war is wont to be described as one that avenges wrongs, when a nation or state has to be punished, for refusing to make amends for the wrongs inflicted by its subjects, or to restore what it has seized unjustly.
Thomas Aquinas (AD 1225–74) later developed this in some detail. War was deemed just if it was in self-defence, punished aggression (but was not for revenge), was undertaken by the authorities, or was a last resort. It should ultimately make peace. This framework has persisted in international relations until this day, reinvented as humanitarian intervention and regime change war by the 1990s in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the 2000s in Iraq, respectively. Just war aided peace, and peace was itself a natural and necessary outcome of war according to this influential view. Just war thinking influences political discussions today, even if indirectly, as during the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Theories such as idealism and liberalism are closely related to these debates, and are often associated with the theories of Immanuel Kant and his plan for ‘Perpetual Peace’.
The concept of peace has also been enriched by Marxist thinking about oppression, power and class struggle, exploitation, and revolutionary change, driven, partly at least, by grassroots actors. This has given rise to understandings of peace that include social justice and emancipation, with important implications for the poor, women, and children. (The idea of violent revolutionary change, associated with some variants of Marxism, presents a conundrum for peace.) Gramscian understandings of the potential of mobilization of grassroots actors for their rights have also been important.
It is important to note a division in the understanding of peace amongst the various schools of peace studies around the world. Some see it as a contribution to maintaining the dominant liberal and capitalist world order, which for many outside of the global north is a negative peace. More critical approaches see peace as connected to social justice and emancipation, meaning human rights, equality, solidarity, and sustainability, required for a positive peace. Some claim that Eurocentric norms and institutions dominate global governance often at the expense of the general population. Most schools argue that they are aiming at a positive peace, of course. Most of these arguments are critical of realist approaches to peace. There is also a post-modern perspective indicating the necessity of social justice, participatory forms of democracy, human rights, equality, and autonomy. Such views also generally posit that no one perspective has a monopoly on defining peace. Multiple forms must therefore coexist.
A range of critical and post-colonial theorists foresaw the increasing demands made of the concept of peace. Some highlighted the rights and needs of humanity, problems arising from global capitalism and neoliberalism, the inherent biases of liberalism, and the capacity for peoples to mobilize for social justice, equality, and freedom. Among many these included: Paulo Freire (a Brazilian philosopher (1921–97), who wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed ); Frantz Fanon (a French-Algerian writer (1925–61) whose works inspired anti-colonial liberation movements); Homi Bhabha (a post-colonial theorist (1949–) who showed how hybrid political frameworks arise from the ways in which colonized peoples resist the power of the colonizer); and Amartya Sen (an Indian economist (1933–) who won the 1998 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics and helped to create the United Nations Human Development Index, which compares and ranks each country’s state of development). These more critical views of peace seek to uncover power and its workings and establish a fairer form of domestic and international politics, more likely to lead to a positive, or even hybrid, form of peace.
One theory has dominated the modern debate on peace so far, however. The liberal peace theory suggests that democracy ensures that domestic politics within states are peaceful. Together with free trade it also ensures that states do not then go to war with each other, following the sole ‘law’ of international relations that democratic states do not fight each other (but instead cooperate and trade) so leading to a relatively peaceful, though perhaps imperfect, regional and international order. This argument has often been used as an explanation for the stability of Europe after World War II, in contrast to its earlier history.
At the international level, the liberal peace has been supported by international institutions, which during the 20th century facilitated cooperation between states over problems such as disarmament and arms control and supported free trade and common norms, rules, and laws. Since the end of the Cold War in 1990, the West has reiterated the related argument that peace requires democratic and human rights observing states, free trade, a cosmopolitan recognition of diverse identities, and coexistence at the community level. There has been a political and scholarly consensus around these factors, especially in the global north. In the global south, a related consensus has been growing, despite the fact that it has often not benefited equally from the global economic conditions.
Such thinking has continued to evolve and a further contribution has been offered by contemporary liberal thinkers (including the American scholars John Rawls, Michael Walzer, and Michael Doyle) and policymakers. They have also connected Kant’s liberal peace with the capacity to wage ‘just war’ (meaning wars, often called ‘humanitarian intervention’ or ‘regime change’, may be legitimate if they support the non-proliferation of weapons and protect human rights, democracy, and a rule of law).
The liberal peace aimed to balance the interests of states and their societies, to maintain some elite level interests, but also to a large degree to assuage the concerns of society, all within an international architecture of peace determined by international organizations and law. It represents a balance between freedom, social justice, and mutual regulation, designed to prevent war and domestic conflict. Failing to address issues in one or several of these essential elements may undermine a positive form of peace. Though flawed it probably represents one of the most sophisticated forms in history.
The liberal peace framework can be broken down into a number of intellectual and practical traditions:
The current fragility of the post-Cold War order has again reopened the question of what is peace? Should it follow the Western model of liberal peace or are there other alternatives? In the 21st century, a neoliberal peace appears to have become dominant in international policy, where the focus is more on deregulation and free-market reforms than human rights and democracy. However, there is widespread concern that it does not meet the standards required for a positive form of peace.