By Rajkumar Bobichand
Many people and organisations often say that they want peace. Here, many people and organisations include government people, politicians, academics, women leaders, student leaders, community leaders, religious leaders, cultural leaders, religious groups, political parties, civil society organisations and governments. They even stage demonstrations and rallies to persuade for peace. They take all-out efforts and means including media to persuade for peace. They say that if there is no peace, there cannot be development and progress of the society or the nation. They say that as violence occurs, there cannot be peace. They say that violence must be stopped and peace must prevail.
In other words, many people often use the word, “peace” very loosely. What they perceive peace is just absence of direct and visible violence. Many people cannot understand and hardly try to understand why such violence occurs. There are structural and cultural violence which are less visible and indirect; and they support the visible and direct violence. That is why many people and organisations both governmental and non-governmental demand to stop violence and seek for peace. Many people think that if there is no violence, there will be peace.
However, the kind of peace, which prevails in the absence of violence many people perceive, is negative peace. Norwegian mathematician and pioneer of peace studies, Johan Galtung (1969) established two main distinctions that identify the two types of peace that can exist. The first is called negative peace and means that there is no direct violence present. The second type is called positive peace and is a state where there is not only no direct violence present, but that there is also no indirect or structural violence present.
In other words, absence of war is often described as negative (‘cold’) peace, and is contrasted with positive (‘warm’) peace, which encompasses all aspects of the good society that we might envisage for ourselves: universal rights, economic well-being, ecological balance and other core values.
As Fisher et al. (2000) describes: Peace is a process: many-sided, never-ending struggle to transform violence. Both those who accept the need for coercive force, including violence, and those who take a totally non-violent stance, and many others with views in between, would say that they want peace. But their ideas about what peace really is are rather different.
Stable peace is a relatively rare state. Many societies and communities are excluded from peace by a range of economic, political and social factors. Peace is often compared to health, in that it is more easily recognised by its absence. Like health, all have access to it. However, unlike health it is contested: people disagree over what a peaceful society is.
Many people understand peace to be the absence of war or violence. While this is, of course, vital, others see it as only first step towards a fuller ideal, using definitions such as: an interweaving of relationships between individuals, groups and institutions that value diversity and foster the full development of human potential. Women in Taliban-controlled (‘Peaceful’) Afghanistan, deprived of education and opportunities to work, would not take long to see the difference.
There are always who fear peace. Many have good reason to do so: they will lose wealth, status and power as result of what they have done. Oxfam in the Horn of Africa developed the concept of ‘dynamic stability’ to describe its vision of a peace in which conflicts would still occur, but violence would be absent.
There are a number of different concepts that are important to understanding what is involved when a person talks about peace studies. Most academic students and researchers agree upon a certain point of reference in defining peace and the human motivation that drives a desire for peace. One of the main concepts that advocates of peace studies argue is that peace is part of the normal human condition. Experts in peace studies try to present their leaders with information that will help them make long term peaceful decisions that follow this concept.
Peace is a political condition that ensures justice and social stability through formal and informal institutions, practices, and norms. Several conditions must be met for peace to be reached and maintained: balance of political power among the various groups within a society, region, or, most ambitiously, the world – legitimacy for decision makers and implementers of decisions in the eyes of their respective group, as well as those of external parties, duly supported through transparency and accountability; – recognised and valued interdependent relationships among groups fostering long-term cooperation during periods of agreement, disagreement, normality, and crisis –reliable and trusted institutions for resolving conflicts; –sense of equality and respect, in sentiment and in practice, within and without groups and in accordance with international standards; –mutual understanding of rights, interests, intents, and flexibility despite incompatibilities. Notoriously elusive, peace connotes more than a mere absence of war or hostilities; an absence of conflict is impossible. In addition, the state of peace should be distinguished from techniques that simply avoid conflicts or employ violent or coercive approaches to engage in, manage, or resolve them.
Therefore, the kind of peace, which exists in the absence of violence will not sustain and cannot be lasting peace. Conflict will recur if Basic Human Needs (will be discussed later) are not met where positive peace can exist addressing the Structural and Cultural violence. Without addressing Structural and Cultural violence and meeting Basic Human Needs, Positive Peace cannot be built.