Violence, Peace, and Peace Research

1 This point is elaborated further in Theories of Peace (forthcoming), Chapter 1.1.

2 This, of course, is not strictly true. It was not on Fascist or nazi agendas, nor is it on the agenda of contemporary revolutionary thinking. However, even for these cases violence is not an end, but rather a means to overcome obstacles impeding the realization of a future order, the millennium, the communist society, etc; these future orders do not seem to contain violence. But this is hardly a universal human invariant. The Viking paradise looks violent, and warlike tribes/societies like the Pathans would probably put complete absence of violence last on the agenda, if at all.

3 But what if a social order is such that some people live well in solid, concrete houses and others in shacks that crumble under the first quake, killing the inhabitants? In other words, even if the natural disaster is unavoidable, differential social impact may have been avoidable. This may certainly justify the use of the term 'structural violence' for such differential housing standards, not only because of differential exposure to earthquakes (as in the earthquake zone in Western Sicily), but because of implications for differential health standards in general, educational possibilities, and so on and so forth. Whether it justifies the use of such epithets as 'violent' or 'assas sin' to the people sustaining such social structures, or (which is not quite the same) to the people on top of such social structures, is another matter.

4 Since the potential level depends not only on the use and distribution of available resources, but also on insight, a crucial person in this picture is the scientist or anyone who opens for new insights into how old, or new, resources may be utilized. In other words, anyone who makes possible what was formerly not feasible raises the level of potentiality. But the level may also be lowered, perhaps not so often because insight is forgotten (although history is full of such cases too) as because resources become more scarce - for instance due to pollution, hoarding, over- utilization, etc. In short, we make no assumption about the shape of the potential realization curve through time, nor do we make any assumption about the corresponding curve for actual realization. In particular we reject the optimistic assumption according to which both curves are monotonously increasing and with a decreasing gap so that there is asymptotic convergence of the actual to the potential, 'until the potentialities of man are fully realized'. This is an ideology, usually in the form of an underlying assumption, not a description or reality. As Bertrand Russell writes (Autobiography, Vol, III, p. 221): 'When I was young, Victorian optimism was taken for granted. It was thought that freedom and prosperity would spread gradually throughout the world by an orderly process, and it was hoped that cruelty, tyranny and injustice would continually diminish. Hardly anyone was haunted by the fear of great wars. Hardly anyone thought of the nineteenth century as a brief interlude between past and future barbarism -.' In short, let us make no assumptions, but focus on the causes for a discrepancy between the curves, admitting for a lag in the application and distribution of new insights; whether they are called technological or social.

5 However, it is by no means obvious how potential life-span should be defined. One cannot use the age at death of the oldest person dying today or this year; this may be too low because he does not benefit from possible advances in hygiene etc. made too late to have an impact on him, or not yet made, and it may be too high because he is specially advantaged genetically. But the average of the p% of the social order benefiting fully from insight and resources already available should at least yield a basis for an estimate of what is possible today.

6 In an article 'On the Meaning of Nonviolence', Journal of Peace Research, 1965, pp. 228-257 the concept of influence is basic in an effort to analyze the difference between violence and non violence, and positive and negative versions of the latter. In the present article the focus is on a typology of violence, not on a typology of non-violence.

7 Ibid., pp. 230-234.

8 Loc. cit.

9 This is a recurrent theme in Herbert Marcsue, One-dimensional Man (Boston Press, 1968), especially Part I, 'One-dimensional Society'.

10 This is a recurrent theme in much of the analysis of violence in the US. Violence against property is seen as training, the first window-pane crushed to pieces is also a blow against the bourgeois in oneself, a liberation from former constraints, an act of communication signalling to either camp a new belongingness and above all a rejection of tacit rules of the game. 'If they can do that to property, what can they do to persons -'

11 It was pointed out by Herman Kahn (at a seminar at PRIO, May 1969) that middle class students and lower class police may have highly different relations to property: as something highly replaceable for the middle class student in an affluent society, as something difficult to attain for a lower class Irish cop. What to one is a relatively unproblematic act of communication may to the other be sacriligeous, particularly since students probably aspire to mobility and free dom unfettered by property ties.

12 The term 'institutional violence' is often sometimes used, but we have preferred 'structural' since it is often of a more abstract nature and not anything that can be traced down to a particular institution. Thus, if the police are highly biased the term institutionalized violence may be appro priate, but this is a highly concrete case. There may be violence built into a structure without any police institution at all, as will be developed in the next section.

13 This is clearly expressed by Stokeley Carmichael in 'Black Power' (The Dialectics of Liberation, David Cooper ed., London Penguin, p. 151, 1968):

'It is important to this discussion of racism to make a distinction between the two types: individual racism and institutional racism. The first type consists of overt acts by individ uals, with usually immediate results of the death of victims, or the traumatic and violent destruction of property. This type can be recorded on TV cameras and can frequently be ob served in the process of commission.

The second type is less overt, far more subtle, less identifiable in terms of specific individ uals committing the acts, but is no less destructive of human life. The second type is more the overall operation of established and respected forces in the society and thus does not re ceive the condemnation that the first type receives.

His distinction individual/institutional is the same as our personal/structural. But we prefer the term 'personal' because the person sometimes acts on behalf of groups, whereas 'individual' may be interpreted as the opposite of 'group'. But particularly in the context Carmichael discusses group violence is immensely important - the mob lynching as opposed to the individual murderer- but that does not make the violence institutional. It still satisfies all the other criteria, e. g. it consists of 'overt acts by individuals', 'can be recorded on TV-cameras' (as in a war), etc.

14 The difficulty here, as often pointed out, is that international statistics usually reflect averages and not dispersions, ranking nations in order of average achievement, not in terms of degree of equality achieved in distribution. One reason is of course that such data are not readily available, but that is only begging the question why they are not available. One reason for that again may be that it upsets ranking orders and reveals less positive aspects of social orders used to define them selves as world leaders, but that is hardly a sufficient explanation. Another reason might be that the problem is simply not sufficiently clearly defined, nor is it regarded as sufficiently feasible or indeed desirable to decrease dispersions. When this becomes sufficiently crystallized it will also find expressions in international statistics.

15 The remark in the preceding note holds a fortiori here: not only is it difficult to present any measure of dispersion of power, it is difficult enough to measure power at all, except in the purely formal sense of voting rights. He who comes up with a really meaningful measure in this field will contribute greatly to crystallization of political fighting as well as administrative endeavors.

16 Again the same: the publications of these correlations would contribute significantly to in creased awareness, since the current ideology is precisely that correlations between achieved and ascribed ranks should be as low as possible, preferably zero.

17 Economic sanctions occupy interesting middle position here. They are clearly violent in their ultimate consequences, which are starvation etc., but the hope is of course that they are slow enough to permit capitulation much before that. At the same time they are clearly also built into the structure, for the most vulnerable countries are also the countries that tend to be at the bottom of the international stratification in general: high in dependence on trade, low in commodity dispersion and low on trade partner dispersion. See Johan Galtung, 'On the Effects of Interna tional Economic Sanctions, With Examples from the Case of Rhodesia', World Politics, 1967, pp. 387-416.

18 One expression of what is meant by social justice is found in declarations of human rights, where a number of norms about equality are stated. However, they very often suffer from the defi ciency that they are personal more than structural. They refer to what individuals can do or can have, not to who or what decides what they can do or have; they refer to distribution of resources, not to power over the distribution of resources. In other words, human rights as usually conceived of are quite compatible with paternalism whereby power-holders distribute anything but ultimate power over the distributions, so that equalization without any change in the power structure is obtained. It is almost painful to see how few seem to realize that much of the current anti-estab lishment anti-authority revolt is precisely about this: concessions are not enough, not even equality is enough, it is the way in which decisions about distribution are arrived at and imple mented that is basic. But there is little reason to believe that this will not also in due time crystallize into some kind of human right and be added to that list of philosophical and political battlefields.

19 Exploitation also has an ambiguity which we actually have exploited in this section. There seems to be a liberal interpretation in terms of distribution and inequality, and a Marxist interpretation in terms of power, particularly over the use of the surplus produced by others (in a capitalist economy). Clearly one can have one type of exploitation without the other.

20 I am indebted to Hans Rieger and other participants in the seminar at the Gandhian Institute of Studies for pointing out the possibility of using the manifest-latent distinction in connection with both personal and structural violence.

21 This is a point where Gandhi and Mao Tse-Tung would agree in theory, although in practice they are both so dominant in their organizations that it probably was not too meaningful to speak cf real egalitarianism.

22 See Note 13 for Carmichael's analysis. The basic point in our communication structure is of course that personal violence much more easily 'can be recorded on TV cameras', although this is not correct strictly speaking. There is no intrinsic reason why structural violence should not be registered on TV cameras; in fact, really good cameramen delight in doing exactly this. But the concept of news is against its prominent display; that concept is in itself geared to personal rather than structural violence. For an analysis, see Johan Galtung and Mari Holmboe Ruge, 'The Structure of Foreign News', Journal of Peace Research, 1965, pp. 64-91, especially on person vs Structure-oriented news.

23 Herman Schmid seems to be very correct when he points out (op. cit., p. 217) that peace research grew out of a certain historical condition and the basic concepts were colored by that condition. No doubt this explains some of the emphasis on symmetric conflict, and we would add, on personal violence both because of war memories and war threats. However, the threats of a ma jor war in the North Atlantic area failed to materialize, economic growth continued, but exploi tation remained constant or increased. So, towards the end of the 'sixties the focus changes;' for some persons to a completely new focus (as when Schmid and others would argue in favor of conflict creation research, of polarization and revolution research), for others (as the present au thor) to an extension of focus, as argued in the present article.

24 Thus, it is almost unbelievable how little the gap between rich and poor seems to be affected by the general increase, within nations and between nations.

25 This is the general theme in Johan Galtung, 'A structural Theory of Integration', Journal of Peace Research, 1968, pp. 375-395.

26 One of these implications is of course that it enhances his power: he monopolizes information from the level above and can convert this into power at his own level. Another implication is that he is very often untrained for or unfit for the task to be performed at the higher level since his frame of reference all the time has been level n-1. The manager of a certain type of products suddenly finds himself on the board of a big business corporation doing quite different things; the teading nation in a regional alliance suddenly finds itself responsible for world affairs and forced to think within a completely new frame of reference, and so on.

27 We have not discussed the possibility of denying rank differences completely by making every body equal, since there seem always to be some differences that elude equalization attempts and these differences tend to become significant. Make everybody citizens with equal voting rights, and differences in style of life become overwhelming, abolish class differences on trains and the upper classes go by plane, and so on.

28 Few have expressed this image as well as Eldridge Cleaver in Soul on Ice (London: Cape, 1969, p. 92):

'Both police and the armed forces follow orders. Orders. Orders flow from the top down. Up there, behind closed doors, in antechambers, in conference rooms, gavels bang on the tables, the tinkling of silver decanters can be heard as ice water is poured by well fed, con servatively dressed men in horn-rimmed glasses, fashionably dressed American widows with rejuvenated faces and tinted hair, the air permeated with the square humor of Bob Hope jokes. Here all the talking is done, all the thinking, all the deciding.

Gray rabbits of men scurry forth from the conference room to spread decisions through out the city, as News. Carrying out orders is a job, a way of meeting the payments on the house, a way of providing for one's kiddies. In the armed forces it is also a duty, patriotism' Not to do so is treason.'

29 See Note 11 for Kahn's analysis, where he added that fighting with fists would be about as natural for the Irish cops as it is unnatural for the upper middle class student, and fighting with words as natural for that student as it is unnatural for the cop. Hence, when the student destroys property and heaps abuse on the police he challenges the police much beyond the tolerance level, and the police respond with the reaction they know, violence; a reaction for which the students are untrained. One does not need structural explanations to account for an outburst of violence in such cases. But one could ask why such people are in the police department, and one explanation can supplement rather than supersede another.

30 This coin metaphor, of course, is not to suggest that one side excludes the other. Indeed, as pointed out so many times in the preceding section: a given social order may exhibit both, one or (perhaps) neither of them. The metaphor applies to the conceptualization of peace, not to the empirical world.

31 Of course, I am very much aware of changes in my own presentation of these concepts, just as I am confident that new formulations will follow in the wake of those presented here. Whereas 'negative peace' remains fairly constant, meaning 'absence of violence', I think it gains from the precision given to 'violence' in that context, a 'personal violence'. But 'positive peace' is con stantly changing (as is 'positive health' in medical science). I used to see it in terms of integra tion and cooperation ('An Editorial', JPR, 1964, pp. 1-4), but now agree fully with Herman Schmid that this expresses a much too integrated and symmetric view of conflict groups, and probably reflects the East-West conflict or a certain ideology in connection with that conflict. I would now identify 'positive peace' mainly with 'social justice', the latter taken in the double sense of this article - but I think one could also be open to other candidates for inclusion since the definition given of violence is broad enough also to point in other directions. This is to some extent attempted in section 1.3 of Theories of Peace. Moreover, I think Schmid is basically right (op. cit. p. 221) in saying that there is a tendency to focus on negative peace because consensus is more easily obtained - but I share his rejection of that tendency. To reveal and unmask the subtle mechanisms of structural violence and explore the conditions for their removal or neutralization is at least as important, although comparisons of the two types of violence in terms of priorities seems a little bit like discussing whether medical research should focus on cancer or heart diseases. And to this should be added, emphatically, that a discipline fully satisfied with its own foundations and definition is probably a dead discipline. Fundamental debate and debate over fundamentals are the signs of health, not of disease. These issues are difficult, and we shall make progress only through more practice in analyzing them and more praxis in working with them.

32 In Theories of Development, forthcoming.

33 Thus, there is little doubt that in general peace research (Schmid, op. cit., p. 222) in this decade that has passed since it was launched has met with more approval from the north-western estab lishment in the world than from other quarters, but so has cancer research. From this it does not follow that peace research is meaningless to the third world and to revolutionary forces. The same skewed distribution can be found almost anywhere, due to the skewed distribution of world resources and the generally feudal structure of the world. But Schmid is certainly right in setting peace research in a social setting: 'who will pay for it', and 'who will be able to implement advice from peace researcher' are basic questions. I only fail to see that there should be any implicit reason why peace research should fall into the arms of the establishment more than into other arms not to mention be able to retain considerable autonomy in its pursuits. This presupposes an aca demic structure that does not steer all research into the arms of the power-holders, left or right, but leaves the road open for pursuits of insights into the mechanisms behind any kind of violence, any kind of obstacle to human self realization.

34 Thus, peace research is seen here as an effort to promote the realization of values. To what extent these values coincide or not with the interests of certain groups is another matter. Hence, peace research could not be identified with the ideology of a group unless that group professed the same values. It is also an open question whether group identification with these values will in fact serve to promote these values.

35 Some of this is explored in 'On the Meaning of Nonviolence', and infinitely much more can be done in this direction. However, the important thing seems to be that there is no reason what soever why peace research should be tied to study of symmetric conflict only, and to integrative, or as we prefer to say, 'associative' (integrative being too strong a term) approaches. Any effort to explore structural violence will lead to awareness of asymmetric conflict, between parties highly unequal in capabilities - and I think it is unfair to state that this is neglected in the type of peace research carried out at the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo. The terms 'topdog underdog' may be unfamiliar and even be resented by those who prefer to do this research in a Marxist tradition and jargon, but it is nevertheless an effort. More precisely, the effort has been to understand better the structure of structural violence, one little indication of which is given in section 3 of this article. And there is no implicit reason why the remedy should be in associative policies only. On the contrary, I tend to feel in general that associative policies are for equals, i.e. for symmetric conflict, whereas polarization and dissociative policies are much better strategies for exploited groups. This is also reflected in the doubleness of non-violent strategies, all themes to be more fully developed in Theories of Conflict (forthcoming). When Schmid says (op. cit., p. 219) that peace research 'should explain .. how latent conflicts are manifested - /and/how the present international ystem is seriously challenged or even broken down' he seems to betray the same type of onesidedness that he accuses peace research of - interest in controlling manifest conflicts only, in bringing about integration, in formulating problems in terms meaningful to international and supranational institutions. But this onesidedness will almost inevitably result if research shall be geared to serve the interests of specific groups, high or low, instead of the promotion of values. It is as hard to believe that disintegration, polarization, dissociation is always the best strategy as it is to believe the opposite.

But this seems to be closely related to Schmid's conflictology (op. cit., pp. 224-228), where he seems to believe that I have a subjectivistic conception of conflict. If there is anything the con flict triangle purports to achieve it is exactly the opposite: the definition of conflict independently of attitudes and behavior, and also independently of perceptions of the situation held by the parties (as different from their attitudes to each other). To me, conflict is incompatibility of goals, but how these goals are established is a quite different matter. To ask the parties for their percep tion of what they pursue and what, if anything, stands in the way is one, but only one approach. I have nothing against definitions in terms of 'interests' the concept of 'goal' is wide enough to encompass. The difficulty is, as Schmid readily and frankly admits (op. cit. p. 227) to 'decide what the interests are' and I share with him the idea that 'this is a challenge rather than a reason to abandon the idea of an interest definition of conflict'. But I feel these interests have to be pos tulated, as I think Marx to a large extent did, and then one has to explore the implications. I also think they can be seen as expressions of values, but not necessarily held by the actor, nor necessar ily held by the investigator, just as postulated values. Thus, if one feels it is contrary to the inter ests of children, as autonomous human beings, to accept the tie as the children of their biological parents, then there is certainly an incompatibility in the present family system: parents have in terests as owners incompatible with the children's interests as self-owners. The only difference be tween this example and Schmid's master-slave example is that he gives a paradigm for a conflict of the past, I a paradigm for a conflict of the future, and moreover for a conflict I think will be manifested fairly soon, in line with the general wave towards defeudalization of the social order. And I certainly agree with Schmid that polarization will here be a part of the solution.

36 For an effort in this direction, see Johan Galtung, Cooperation in Europe (Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 1968).

37 An effort to give some reasons why are found in 'Two Approaches to Disarmament: The Legalist and the Structuralist', Journal of Peace Research 1967, pp.161-195.

38 And it is of course not necessary that all or most or much of this sails under the flag of 'peace research' or any other flag for that matter- only the slightly totalitarian minded would be in clined to feel so. What is important is that it is done, and that there is contact between different approaches so that they and others can benefit from ideological and institutional pluralism.