LUPANE STATE UNIVERSITY

Development Studies Department- Peace and Leadership Studies

Introduction

Peace and Conflict studies is a social science field that identifies and
analyses violent and nonviolent behaviours as well as the structural mechanisms
attending conflicts (including social conflicts) with a view towards understanding those
processes which lead to a more desirable human condition.

Peace studies (irenology), is an interdisciplinary effort aiming at the prevention, de-

escalation, and solution of conflicts by peaceful means, thereby seeking "victory" for all
parties involved in the conflict.

In contrast to war studies (polemology), which has its aim on the efficient attainment of
victory in conflicts, primarily by violent means to the satisfaction of one or more, but not all,
parties involved.

Peace studies is a multidisciplinary approach that involves philosophy, political

science, geography, economics, psychology, sociology, history, anthropology, religious
studies, gender studies, as well as international relations among a variety of others. Relevant
sub-disciplines of fields such as peace economics may be regarded as belonging to peace and
conflict studies.

NB: The aims of peace studies are conflict transformation, conflict resolution through
mechanisms such as peace keeping, peacemaking and peace building.

Definitions

Peace does not mean the total absence of any conflict. It means the absence of violence in all
forms and the unfolding of conflict in a constructive way. Peace therefore exists where
people are interacting non-violently and are managing their conflict positively with respectful
attention to the legitimate needs and interest of all concerned.

 peace is more than just the absence of war and direct violence

 peace is not the absence of conflict but the ability to manage conflict constructively,
as an important opportunity for change and increased understanding of grievances
from the concerned parties.

 peace is a commitment to understanding, celebrating and learning from differences

 peace is a commitment not to harm, but also to nurture, all individuals with different
views and opinions.

Some peace thinkers and practitioners have abandoned a single and encompassing definition
of peace. They argue that peace should be perceived as a plurality. This post modern
understanding is based on the philosophy of Jean Francois Lyotard.

 Inner peace- (or peace of mind) refers to a deliberate state of psychological or

spiritual calmness despite the potential presence of stressors. Peace of mind, serenity,
and calmness are descriptions of being free from the effects of stress. Furthermore
LUPANE STATE UNIVERSITY
Development Studies Department- Peace and Leadership Studies

inner-peace is a state of being which revolves around accommodating

reverence/respect for others. Therefore, inner peace saves as a determinant factor on
how one relates to those who surround her/him.

 Outer peace is having a suitable and stable world outside our selves that exists for the
betterment of every individual and is neutral or positive to our lifestyles, our social,
economic, spiritual, and cultural worlds that exist as an extension of ourselves.
Therefore it (outer-peace) relates to environment, culture and outer most relationships

NB: Inner peace has a causation influence on outer peace or vice-versa.

As Johan Gultung once argued, “an important task in peace research has always been and
always is the exploration of the concept of peace” (Gultung 1981: 183). In spite of Gultung’s
appeal, there seem to have been few studies on peace concept worthy of note.

In defining peace two facets of the concept as laid out by Gultung should be taken on board
which are; positive peace and negative peace.

Johan Gultung, a prominent founder of peace thinking, in the 1964th founding edition of The
Journal of Peace Research, came up with two typologies of peace positive and negative
peace. He, conceived “[…negative peace as the absence of violence, absence of war - and
positive peace as the integration of human society” (Gultung, 1964).

In relation to that, he also introduced typologies of violence: direct, structural and cultural
violence. Gultung further notes that negative peace is the absence of organized direct
violence whereas positive peace is the absence of structural, direct and cultural violence. It
can be experienced by the prevalence of justice, harmony and equality.

Negative peace refers to the absence of direct-violence, for example, when a ceasefire is
enacted, negative peace will ensue. It is negative because something undesirable stopped
happening (e.g. the violence stopped) but grievances are pending.

Positive peace is filled with positive content such as restoration of relationships, the creation
of social systems that serve the needs of the whole population and the constructive resolution
of conflict.

Barash and Webel (2014), defined positive peace as a social condition in which exploitation
is eliminated and in which there is neither overt violence nor the more subtle phenomenon of
underlying structural violence. It denotes the continuing presence of an equitable and just
social order as well as ecological harmony.

Grewel (2003), summarizing Gultung’s classification of peace, states that, negative peace: is
pessimistic, peace not always by peaceful means. Positive peace is structural integration,
optimistic, curative, preventive, peace by peaceful means.
LUPANE STATE UNIVERSITY
Development Studies Department- Peace and Leadership Studies

Theories of peace.

Sociological theories are core and underlining strength of peace studies. They guide
practitioners in their intervention strategies and they guide researchers in their studies. A
theory is a set of interrelated concepts used to describe, explain and predict how a society and
its parts are related to each other. Many theories as to how world peace can be achieved or
built have been put forward.

Democratic Peace Theory(DPT)

Democratic peace theory is a theory which posits that democracies are hesitant to engage
in armed conflict with other identified democracies. In contrast to theories explaining war
engagement, it is a "theory of peace" outlining motives that dissuade state-sponsored
violence.

Some theorists prefer terms such as "mutual democratic pacifism" or "inter-democracy non-
aggression hypothesis" so as to clarify that a state of peace is not singular to democracies, but
rather that it is easily sustained between democratic nations.

Among proponents of the democratic peace theory, several factors are held as motivating
peace between democratic states:

 democratic leaders are forced to accept culpability for war losses to a voting public;

 publicly accountable states people are inclined to establish diplomatic institutions for
resolving international tensions;

 democracies are not inclined to view countries with adjacent policy and governing
doctrine as hostile;

 democracies tend to possess greater public wealth than other states, and therefore
eschew/avoid war to preserve infrastructure and resources.

Those who dispute this theory often do so on grounds that it conflate correlation with
causation, and that the academic definitions of 'democracy' and 'war' can be manipulated so
as to manufacture an artificial trend.

The Sane Individuals’ World Theory.

It posits that for there to be peace in the world and for it to be maintained, people with right
morality, ideology, psychological health, training and knowledge should dominate the society
especially among the elite.

By having this kind of people especially on top will avoid mistakes due to immorality,
psychological deficiencies, lack of training etc and facilitate the practice of more peaceful
policies.
LUPANE STATE UNIVERSITY
Development Studies Department- Peace and Leadership Studies

Emphasis is on the elimination of psychological deviants from position of power to whom

war might be a solution or outcome of personal problems. For there to be peace there should
be leaders of good morality.

Nuclear Peace Theory

When there is nuclear power war is unlikely to happen because of the deterrent effect of
nuclear. Nuclear peace is a theory of international relations that argues that under some
circumstances nuclear weapons can induce stability and decrease the chances of crisis
escalation.

In particular, nuclear weapons are said to have induced stability during the Cold War, when
both the US and the USSR possessed mutual second strike retaliation capability, eliminating
the possibility of nuclear victory for either side.

Proponents of nuclear peace argue that controlled nuclear proliferation may be beneficial
for inducing stability.

Critics of nuclear peace argue that nuclear proliferation not only increases the chance
of interstate nuclear conflict, but increases the chances of nuclear material falling into the
hands of violent non-state groups who are free from the threat of nuclear retaliation.

The major debate on this issue has been between Kenneth Waltz, the founder of neorealist
theory in international relations, and Scott Sagan, a leading proponent of organizational
theories in international politics.
Waltz generally argues that "more may be better," contending that new nuclear states will
use their acquired nuclear capabilities to deter threats and preserve peace. Sagan argues
that "more will be worse", since new nuclear states often lack adequate organizational
controls over their new weapons, which makes for a high risk of either deliberate or
accidental nuclear war or theft of nuclear material by terrorists to perpetrate nuclear
terrorism.
Violence
NB- Handout on Definition of Violence
LUPANE STATE UNIVERSITY
Development Studies Department- Peace and Leadership Studies

The Violence Triangle

Johan Galtung has shown that there are several different ways of classifying the
phenomenon of violence. Here I will summarize the three main types of violence: (1)
personal or direct, (2) structural or indirect, and (3) cultural or symbolic.

In his paper “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” Galtung made his highly significant
— and now widely accepted — distinction between the two fundamental types of violence:

We shall refer to the type of violence where there is an actor that commits the violence
as personal or direct, and to violence where there is no such actor as structural or indirect.
In both cases individuals may be killed or mutilated, hit or hurt in both senses of these
words [i.e., physical and psychological], and manipulated by means of stick or carrot
strategies. But whereas in the first case these consequences can be traced back to concrete
persons as actors, in the second case this is no longer meaningful. There by not be any
person who directly harms another in the structure. The violence is built into the structure
and shows up as unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances. (1969: 170-171)

In the follow-up paper, Galtung introduced his third category, cultural violence:

By ‘cultural violence’ we mean those aspects of culture, the symbolic sphere of our
existence . . . that can be used to justify or legitimize direct or structural violence. (1990:
291)

For Galtung, simplistic stereotypes that identify entire cultures as violent are not very
helpful; it’s much more preferable to say, instead, that a particular aspect of a particular
culture is an example of cultural violence. Explaining further, Galtung notes:

Cultural violence makes direct and structural violence look, even feel, right — at least not
wrong. . . . One way cultural violence works is by changing the moral color of an act from
red/wrong to green/right or at least to yellow/acceptable; an example being ‘murder on
behalf of the country as right, on behalf of oneself wrong’. Another way is by making reality
opaque, so that we do not see the violent act or fact, or at least not as violent. (1990: 291-
292)

Galtung suggests that the three types of violence can be represented by the three corners of
a violence triangle. The image is meant to emphasize that the three types are causally
connected to each other.
LUPANE STATE UNIVERSITY
Development Studies Department- Peace and Leadership Studies

Among the three types of violence represented in the above diagram, the most obvious type
is direct or personal. Everything from threats and psychological abuse to rape, murder, war,
and genocide belong to this category. It is called personal violence because the perpetrators
are human beings, i.e., persons.

The second type, structural violence, is much less obvious, though it can be as deadly, or
deadlier, than direct violence. Typically, no particular person or persons can be held directly
responsible as the cause behind structural violence. Here, violence is an integral part of the
very structure of human organizations — social, political, and economic.

Structural violence is usually invisible — not because it is rare or concealed, but because it is
so ordinary and unremarkable that it tends not to stand out. Such violence fails to catch our
attention to the extent that we accept its presence as a “normal” and even “natural” part of
how we see the world.

Galtung explains the distinction as follows:

Violence with a clear subject-object relation is manifest because it is visible as action. . . .

Violence without this relation is structural, built into structure. Thus, when one husband
beats his wife there is a clear case of personal violence, but when one million husbands
keep one million wives in ignorance there is structural violence. Correspondingly, in a
society where life expectancy is twice as high in the upper as in the lower classes, violence is
exercised even if there are no concrete actors one can point to directly attacking others, as
when one person kills another. (1969: 171)

Even though structural violence has real victims, it has no real perpetrators. And because
there are no real perpetrators, the question of intention does not arise. To identify
structural violence, it is imperative to focus on consequences rather than intentions. Galtung
points out that Western legal and ethical systems have been preoccupied with intentional
harm because of their concern with punishing (or holding accountable) the guilty party. This
concern is appropriate for direct violence, but quite irrelevant for structural violence. In fact,
too much concern with catching the perpetrators keeps our attention focused on one kind
of violence, allowing the other, more pervasive kind to go unnoticed. According to Galtung:
LUPANE STATE UNIVERSITY
Development Studies Department- Peace and Leadership Studies

This connection is important because it brings into focus a bias present in so much thinking
about violence, peace, and related concepts: ethical systems directed
against intended violence will easily fail to capture structural violence in their nets — and
may hence be catching the small fry and letting the big fish loose. (1969: 172)

Finally, there is the issue of cultural violence.

Violence, whether direct or structural, is a human phenomenon. As such, it poses for human
beings not only a physical or existential problem but also a problem of meaning. Both types
of violence, therefore, need to be justified or legitimated in one form or another. This occurs
in the arena of culture, in the realm of beliefs, attitudes, and symbols. It would be erroneous
to say that culture is the root cause of violence, since the causal influence runs bilaterally
among the three corners of the violence triangle. Yet, neither direct nor structural violence
can go on for long without at least some support from the culture. In any given culture, the
justification or legitimation of violence can come from a variety of directions — most
significantly from religion, ideology, and cosmology, but also from the arts and sciences.

Conflict
The conflict principle

conflict is a balancing of powers among interests, capabilities, and wills. it is a mutual

adjusting of what people want, can get, and are willing to pursue. Conflict behavior,
whether hostile actions, violence, or war, is then a means and manifestation of this process.

NB- Power-point slides on Conflict Notes