At the outset we face definitional challenges and the need to differentiate among different terms and concepts. What exactly do we mean by peace? The term is highly emotive, historian Michael Howard wrote, and is often abused as a tool of political propaganda. When peace is defined narrowly it can imply passivity and the acceptance of injustice. During the cold war the word had subversive implications and was often associated with communism. Moscow sponsored ersatz “peace councils,” which gave the word a negative connotation. Hesitancy about the meaning of peace existed long before the cold war. In the years before World War I Andrew Carnegie lavishly funded programs to prevent war and advance international cooperation, but he was uncomfortable with the word peace and wanted to leave it out of the title of the international endowment he left as his legacy. Peace is more than the absence of war. It is also “the maintenance of an orderly and just society,” wrote Howard – orderly in being protected against the violence or extortion of aggressors, and just in being defended against exploitation and abuse by the more powerful. Many writers distinguish between negative peace, which is simply the absence of war, and positive. peace, which is the presence of justice. “Peace can be slavery or it can be freedom; subjugation or liberation,” wrote Norman Cousins. Genuine peace means progress toward a freer and more just world. Johan Galtung developed the concept of “structural violence” to describe situations of negative peace that have violent and unjust consequences. Violence in Galtung’s expansive definition is any condition that prevents a human being from achieving her or his full potential. Leonardo Boff, the Brazilian priest and theologian, employed the term “originating violence,” which he defined as an oppressive social condition that preserves the interests of the elite over the needs of dispossessed and marginalized populations. Originating or structural violence can include impoverishment, deprivation, humiliation, political repression, a lack of human rights, and the denial of self-determination. Positive peace means transcending the conditions that limit human potential and assuring opportunities for selfrealization.
Peace as a Global Issue: Legacy of Conflicts
