Meeting hall where the armistice talks between the North Korean and Republif of Korea-USA-UN forces were held in 1953. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. Author: Clay Gilliland.
by Kathie MM
Negative peace sounds pretty good, right? Signing truces and other agreements to end all the dirty little wars in which our government involves us, and putting a stop to terrorism, gang wars, domestic violence, and the other forms of violence haunting our lives today—wouldn’t that be heavenly? Yes, but wouldn’t it be even better to help peace endure at all levels of society?
Unfortunately, at the international and national levels, the history of peace treaties, ceasefires, nonaggression pacts, and truces is not very encouraging. Treaties and truces have been made and broken repeatedly, at the cost of millions and millions of lives, as greedy governments have used increasingly sophisticated armaments to seize land and resources from resistant others.
At the family level, despite innovative truce bells and family truce intervals, marital cease-and-desist agreements often fail to produce lasting marital peace, leading instead to the negative peace of separation, divorce, and angry children, with all parties smoldering with a sense of unfair treatment.
As for gang violence, truces among violent gangs are relatively commonplace, but like those between nations, also commonly broken. Some evidence indicates that while truces may work for awhile, gang warfare usually resumes in the absence of efforts to address fundamental political and social welfare challenges like marginalization, unemployment, and lack of equal opportunity.
Such concerns are very much the purview of positive peace advocates. Positive peace, by definition, addresses the roots of violence. As conceptualized by Johan Galtung and other peace advocates, positive peace means cooperation for mutual and equal benefit. It means reform of the political and social structures that create and reinforce inequality. It means genuine respect for human rights. It means that women’s voices matter, that people of color don’t need to fear entering their churches, that people of non-Christian faiths can walk fearlessly on our streets. It means that war profiteers are not enabled to put their pursuit of profits ahead of the well-being—indeed the lives—of everyone whom they can “other” for their differences.
Positive peace may sound like the impossible dream, the delusion of cockeyed optimists, but if we don’t strive for it, what kind of future will the world have?
For further reading, see Galtung’s Mini-theory of peace.