Alternative Editorial: Let's Not Be Patient
Even as we constantly call out the mesmerising, triggering, headline business model of the mainstream news media, we know we cannot switch it off altogether. Without some awareness of how the majority of citizens are ‘reading the world’, we cannot engage with them emotionally. Lacking any sense of the pain and grief controlling the public narrative would make our own brighter view seem Pollyannaish.
So we, like you maybe, subject ourselves to the daily shocks to our system. Each day another layer of atrocity – war, injustice, degradation. And if we are in any danger of becoming numb, the fate of a never-ending stream of individuals wakes us up. Brianna Ghey, Mahsa Amini and just recently Alexei Navalny.
While each gives rise to an extraordinary human response from those in the immediate environment – Brianna’s mother willing to forgive her murderers, the unbelievable courage of the women’s protest movement in Iran, Navalny’s wife Yulia stepping straight into the breach – the reaction of those with power (governments, but moreso mainstream media) is by comparison weak. And by some measures, stupid.
Focusing on the punishment of murderers when our prisons are already full and unable to rehabilitate criminals. Or focusing singularly on the specific regime guilty of oppressing women in one part of the world when women everywhere are still oppressed. Or on the capacity of our armies when the military industrial complex is itself a major cause of war.
The passing of Johan Galtung, aged 93, on February 17th, whilst sad because a major loss, is nevertheless a prompt to consider his insights. (Full disclosure: AG Founder Indra Adnan was mentored by Galtung from her early 20s). We’ve referred many times in these pages to the distinction between what is commonly understood as conflict resolution and Galtung’s theory of conflict transformation.
To refresh: the first (resolution) is often a zero-sum game, where a gain for one is a loss for the other. Negotiation between two opponents usually attempts to find some balance between their needs—but requires compromise. Too often this sews the seeds of further conflict down the line.
The second (transformation) is an acknowledgement that there are multiple parties to any conflict. Even when violence erupts between two people, the wider causes and context has played an important part.
A recent example might be the incarceration of Jennifer Crumbley for not stopping her son going to school with a gun. Alongside Jenifer sits the gun supplier, the administration that allows easy access to guns and more, ad infinitum. This applies to both small and large conflicts. In the fight between the Palestinians and Israelis, we would have to include up to 20 other parties—see Galtung’s early mapping here.
Conflict transformation takes the perspectives of all those involved - and impacted - and evokes a transcendent response. One that might not address the specific crime but suggests a new scenario in which the relationships between the parties might be different and therefore produce different outcomes.
During his lifetime Galtung consulted to hundreds of governments with local and global ideas for conflict transformation. Sometimes they were trans-regional, sometimes hyperlocal - often challenging. His proposal for a cross-border bi-national zone - or peace park - between Peru and Ecuador, for example, was welcomed (and copied often). The peace park allowed a zone of normalisation of relations between people formally divided. In so doing, a weaving of cultural history and a new shared culture is born.
But in the light of the current escalation of aggression between parties in at least three conflicts – Middle East, Russia/Ukraine, Taiwan/China – causing war mongers in major governments to divert millions to munitions, let’s focus on Galtung’s theory of positive and negative peace. See this interview with Eva Wuchold, a student of Galtung from the European Peace University in Stadtschlaining in Austria:
If someone asked you whether peace reigns in Germany today, what would your answer be?
Eva Wuchold: We can no doubt talk of there being peace in the form of the absence of war, or the absence of organised military violence. But this would be a negative understanding of peace. We can much less talk of peace in the form of an internal social peace, and this has been so since long before the upturn of right-wing parties in Germany and Europe.
Not to mention German military interventions and arms exports, the countless deaths at Europe’s external borders, or the grave consequences of climate change accelerated by the German automotive industry – all a direct result of German policies.
You speak of "negative peace" – what would "positive" peace look like?
Unlike in the case of negative peace, which is premised on the absence of direct violence, we can only talk of positive peace when it coincides with the absence of structural violence.
It is a concept that can be traced back to Johan Galtung.
Precisely – the Norwegian scholar who is regarded as the founding father of peace and conflict studies. By negative peace he understands the encroachment upon fundamental human needs, the causes of which are structural, that is grounded in values, norms, institutions or power relations, but also entirely avoidable.
Or, to put it more generally: it is the discrepancy between that which is – the actual – and the potential – that which could be.
That is a very broad framework.
Yes, it includes all forms of discrimination and exploitation, the unequal distribution of income, education opportunities, life expectancy, also as a result of environmental pollution and wealth gaps of any kind, and the obstruction of any struggle for emancipation.
At the foundation of Galtung’s theory are systemic factors that are independent of social actors. By contrast, positive peace in Galtung’s view is not only to be distinguished from negative peace, understood as the absence of organised collective violence, but also from the traditional understanding of peace as a synonym for stability and balance or a term for "law and order" that reflects a predictable social order.
Positive peace thus operates as a synonym for “all other good things in the world community”, which, in this context, more than anything means the cooperation between and integration of groups of people rather than the absence of violence.
But does that not in the end boil down to just another way of describing the structural conditions of violence, another left-wing, materialist critique of society?
Galtung does indeed understand positive peace as a dynamic process in the sense that it is meant to bring about more just socioeconomic and political relations.
And in his model of a post-revolutionary society, Galtung also tries to outline a counter-perspective in which the costs of structural violence are minimised. But in doing so, he considers aspects that go well beyond the clash between capitalism and socialism.
Can you explain this further?
What characterises Galtung’s model is the idea that society, on the one hand, seeks the personal fulfilment of its individual members, encouraging individualism and individual freedom, and, on the other, it sees the individual not just as an object of social order but also as its measure.
If we assume that society is not just made by but also for individuals, then, according to Galtung, the values of a society also have meaning for the individual. Accordingly, his understanding of individualism demands the opportunity for all to exercise their freedom – even for non-conformists.
His work sets out a structure which grounds solidarity in freedom and which is undergirded by the components of autonomy, participation and cooperation. He goes on to identify the deep phenomena, deep structure and deep culture which operate on all of us, but which remain hidden.
Galtung argues that a structure prescribes certain modes of behaviour in people, which then establish themselves because people act in a particular way without questioning why. Or do not act for similar reasons.
So we are talking about contradictions that are not always visible on the surface?
You could put it like that. Galtung is not just a sociologist and a political scientist – he is also a mathematician. He has developed all of his arguments using the analysis and scientific evaluation of these contradictions.
This is how he arrived at his definition of positive peace – by calculating the sum of relative consensual values in the world community using a list of ten values, namely: 1. The presence of cooperation, 2. Freedom from fear, 3. Freedom from want, 4. Economic growth and development, 5. Absence of exploitation, 6. Equality, 7. Justice, 8. Freedom of action, 9. Pluralism, 10. Dynamism. These are highly complex analyses, not simply a subjective position.
How did you find him as a person?
I saw Galtung first and foremost as a free spirit. His credo with respect to all conflicts that he helped us analyse was "to think out of the box", so to think creatively beyond one-size-fits-all solutions.
For me, after everything I had learned during my studies in Germany, this was nothing less than revolutionary: Galtung’s approach to conflict resolution did not involve compromises, which often result in both sides of the conflict having the feeling that they have given up too much.
His theory was that a breakthrough can only happen once all parties in a conflict force themselves to overcome their old ways of thinking, which results in everyone being satisfied in the end.
Our own experience of Galtung was certainly as an imagineer, capable of seeing the architecture - structural and cultural - that might uphold the possible future. At the same time he was somewhat frustrated with people themselves: he puzzled why so few in authority were capable of a more transcendent perspective. He often suggested that women were instinctively more capable of positive peace than men – partly because of their different, historic social structure, the interconnectedness of their families and communities. Here is Catia Confortini’s proposal for a marriage of feminist theory with Galtung’s idea of positive peace.
Maybe the internet revolution came too late for him, as it is only now (30 years from its outset) that we can begin to see the effects of the decentralisation of information, as well as the introduction of digital natives (more capable of whole system thinking). Certainly you, our readers, will quickly grasp what Galtung is pointing at and RegenA even more so.
So let’s honour his passing by giving up on our patience with the governments and leaders that are unable to see past the limitations of negative peace. Turn away and focus our efforts on cosmolocal communities, where people can engage proactively with positive peace in their own neighbourhoods. Connecting the potential of individuals, their yearning for freedom and fairness, with social and global potential, in real time and on the ground.
Each one of us acting consistently in this way, is the revolution we are already part of – and a fine testament to Johan Galtung's legacy.