The Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung (1930 – 17 February 2024) was a central figure in the foundation and development of the discipline of peace and conflict studies from the 1950s. His work conceptualised the nature of violence to help to build a positive peace. Negative peace is the absence of violent conflict, but the cessation of hostilities alone is not positive peace.
Peacebuilding involves the building of collaborative and supportive relationships for positive peace.
In his 1987 Right Livelihood Award Acceptance Speech he summarised a threefold his understanding of violence
“If peace is the reduction of violence, like the abolition of war and related phenomena, then we have to start with a better conceptualization of violence than the word “war” alone. I have found it useful to distinguish between three types of violence:
- Direct Violence, often expressed as military power, usually killing quickly, and intended to do so;
- Structural Violence, often expressed as economic power, usually unintended, killing slowly;
- Cultural Violence, often expressed as cultural power, legitimizing the other two types of power, telling those who wield power that they have a right to do so, even a duty – for instance because the victims of direct and/or structural power are pagans, savages, atheists, kulaks, communists, what not.”
“I have come to see the first two as relatively simple. There are ways of reducing large-scale abuses of military and economic power, ….. And there are ways of reducing large-scale abuses of economic power through economic self-reliance, … But cultural violence, in the form of religions and ideologies that announce themselves as the only valid faiths, for the whole world and in addition with a Chosen People appointed to spread that faith to others, not only as a right, but as a duty, is more difficult to handle.”
Forms of Direct and Structural and Types of violence can be seen in Table 1 on page 20. But cultural violence supports and legitimises Direct and Structural violence, and unless cultural violence is addressed did not result in positive peace.
In a paper ‘Cultural Violence’, Galtung explains that cultural violence can be found in religion and ideology, language and art, and empirical and formal science. Galtung of course recognises that religion can also provide a basis for peace reconciliation, and social justice, should interpreters emphasise the themes of compassion and forgiveness. But religion is included here, as religious doctrines or interpretations can promote exclusion, intolerance, structural discrimination, or even violence against other groups.
The type of religion he points to is belief in a transcendent God, as this belief is associated with distinctions found in Table II, which gives the binary logic of the chosen and the not chosen, or the saved and the damned, which is involved in the cultural violence of religion. He explains
Whom does God choose? Would it not be reasonable to assume that He chooses those most in His image, leaving it to Satan to take the others, as indicated in Table II? This would give us a double dichotomy with God, the Chosen Ones (by God), The Unchosen Ones (by God, chosen by Satan) and Satan; the chosen heading for salvation and closeness to God in Heaven, the unchosen for damnation and closeness to Satan in Hell. However, Heaven and Hell can also be reproduced on earth, as a foretaste or indication of the afterlife. Misery/luxury can be seen as preparations for Hell/Heaven – and social class as the finger of God.
Such religious legitimation of direct and structural violence could be found throughout history in the Crusades, Christian Antisemitism, Jihadist movement, Hindu Nationalism, Sectarian conflicts between Sunni and Shia Muslims, and so on. Religion also gave legitimation to direct violence in the sectarian conflicts in Northern Ireland, and to segregation in the structural violence of Apartheid in South Africa. But the example Galtung gave in the paper Cultural Violence (1990) was Israel’s use of religion as cultural violence.
For a contemporary example consider the policies of Israel with regard to the Palestinians. The Chosen People even have a Promised Land, the Eretz Yisrael. They behave as one would expect, translating chosenness, a vicious type of cultural violence, into all eight types of direct and structural violence listed in Table I. There is killing; maiming, material deprivation by denying West Bank inhabitants what is needed for livelihood; there is desocialization within the theocratic state of Israel with second class citizenship to non-Jews; there is detention, individual expulsion and perennial threat of massive expulsion. There is exploitation, at least as exploitation B.
The four structural concomitants of exploitation are all well developed: efforts to make the Palestinians see themselves as born underdogs, at most heading for second class citizenship by ‘getting used to it’; giving them small segments of economic activity; keeping them outside Jewish society both within and outside the Green Line, and dealing with Palestinians in a divide et impera mode (as in the Camp David process), never as one people.
At the time of his writing, he did not identify direct violence, which we’ve since seen, but identified the cultural logic that would support it.
Galtung’s framework encourages a holistic approach to peace-building that addresses not only physical violence and the structural violence of social systems, but the cultural violence of ideologies and cultural narratives that sustain them.
1 The 1987 Right Livelihood Award Acceptance Speech, Transcend Media Service: Peace Studies: Inspiration, Objectives, Achievement (2019)
2 Johan Galtung (1990), Cultural Violence, Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 27.3, pp. 291-305.