Johan Galtung
Johan Vincent Galtung was a Norwegian sociologist and the principal founder of the discipline of peace and conflict studies. He was the main founder of the Peace Research Institute Oslo in 1959 and was its first director until 1970. He also established the Journal of Peace Research in 1964.
In 1969, he was appointed to the world's first chair in peace and conflict studies, at the University of Oslo. He resigned his Oslo professorship in 1977 and thereafter held professorships at several other universities; from 1993 to 2000 he taught as Distinguished Professor of Peace Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi. He was the Tun Mahathir Professor of Global Peace at the International Islamic University Malaysia until 2015.
Background
Galtung was born in Oslo. He earned the cand. real. degree in mathematics at the University of Oslo in 1956, and a year later completed the mag. art. degree in sociology at the same university. Galtung received the first of thirteen honorary doctorates in 1975.Galtung's father and paternal grandfather were both physicians. The Galtung name has its origins in Hordaland, where his paternal grandfather was born. Nevertheless, his mother, Helga Holmboe, was born in central Norway, in Trøndelag, while his father was born in Østfold, in the south. Galtung was married twice, and had two children by his first wife Ingrid Eide, Harald Galtung and Andreas Galtung, and two by his second wife Fumiko Nishimura, Irene Galtung and Fredrik Galtung.
Galtung experienced World War II in German-occupied Norway, and as a 12-year-old saw his father arrested by the Nazis. By 1951, he was already a committed peace mediator, and elected to do 18 months of social service in place of his obligatory military service. After 12 months, Galtung insisted that the remainder of his social service be spent in activities relevant to peace.When the Norwegian government refused, he willingly accepted to spend six months in prison.
Galtung died in Stabekk Helsehus og Hospice, Baerum, Norway, on 17 February 2024, at the age of 93.
Career
Upon receiving his mag. art. degree, Galtung moved to Columbia University, in New York City, where he taught for five semesters as an assistant professor in the department of sociology. In 1959, Galtung returned to Oslo, where he founded the Peace Research Institute Oslo. He was the institute's director until 1969.In 1964, Galtung led PRIO to establish the first academic journal devoted to Peace Studies: the Journal of Peace Research. In the same year, he assisted in the founding of the International Peace Research Association. In 1969, he left PRIO for a position as professor of peace and conflict research at the University of Oslo, a position he held until 1978.
Galtung was the director general of the International University Centre in Dubrovnik and helped to found and lead the World Future Studies Federation. He has held visiting positions at other universities, including Santiago, Chile, the United Nations University in Geneva, Witten/Herdecke University in Germany, and at Columbia University, Princeton University and the University of Hawaiʻi in the United States. In 2014, he was appointed the first Tun Mahathir Professor of Global Peace at the International Islamic University Malaysia.
Economist and fellow peace researcher Kenneth Boulding has said of Galtung that his "output is so large and so varied that it is hard to believe that it comes from a human". He was a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
In 1993, he co-founded TRANSCEND: A Peace Development Environment Network. In 1987, he was given the Right Livelihood Award.
Work and views
Conflict Triangle
In Galtung's 1969 paper, "Violence, Peace and Peace Research", he presents his theory of the Conflict Triangle, a framework used in the study of peace and conflict, with the purpose of defining the three key elements of violence that form this "triangle." The theory is based on the principle that peace must be defined by widely accepted social goals, and that any state of peace is characterized by the absence of violence. When a conflict has features of all three areas of violence, the result is a more consolidated, static state of violence in a social system, which may include a conflict or a nation-state, whereas the absence of these three typologies of violence results in peace.Structural Violence
Galtung's concept of structural violence refers to the indirect forms of violence originating from social, economic, and political structures and manifesting primarily as oppression and exploitation. These indirect forms of violence result in injustices in the distribution of political power and economic benefits.Rather than conveying a physical image, structural violence is an avoidable impairment of fundamental human needs. Structural violence is increased in situations where low income individuals also suffer in the rank dimensions of education, health, and power. This is due to an overall consolidation of factors in the social structure, resulting in a high correlation between social class and disempowerment. Structural violence can be recognized through its relative stability, having been built into the social structure. This can make structural violence difficult to ascertain, despite its often vast consequences. This concept has been applied in a large number of cases, some of the most notable are listed below.
Akhil Gupta argued in 2012 that structural violence has been the key influence in the nature and distribution of extreme suffering in India, driven by the Indian state in its alleged corruption, overly bureaucratic standards of governance used to exclude the middle and working classes from the political system through a system of politicized poverty.
Jacklyn Cock's 1989 paper in the Review of African Political Economy applied Galtung's theory of structural violence, analysing the role of militarized society under the apartheid regime of South Africa in the development of patriarchal values that is a form of structural violence against women. Cock found that tacit misdirection of women in society by its leadership focused their energies toward the direct and indirect incorporation of the patriarchal regime in order to maintain the status quo.
Mats Utas claimed that even those youth in Liberia indirectly unaffected by direct violence in the civil war of 1989-1996 suffered from structural violence in the form of association with different blocs, leading to poverty, joblessness and marginalisation effects.
Cultural Violence
Galtung defines cultural violence as ideas, consciousness, language, art, or science that can be used to legitimize or enable direct violence or structural violence. The existence of prevailing or prominent social norms make direct and structural violence seem natural or at least acceptable, and serves to explain how prominent beliefs can become so embedded in a given culture that they function as absolute and inevitable and are reproduced uncritically across generations. Galtung expanded on the concept of cultural violence in a 1990 paper also published in the Journal of Peace Research. This concept has been applied in a limited number of cases, with most occurring after Galtung's follow up paper in 1990, some of the most notable of which are listed below.Johan Galtung has written about Zionism and violence. He has discussed various forms of violence, including structural and cultural violence, in his extensive body of work. Galtung has been critical of Zionism, particularly in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and has linked it to broader themes of structural violence. He has framed Zionism within his broader theories of structural and cultural violence, suggesting that the establishment and actions of the state of Israel have contributed to ongoing conflict and suffering in the region.
Gregory Phillips argues in his 2003 book, Addictions and Healing in Aboriginal Country, that resistance to the Western medical sphere driven by previous atrocities committed against the Aboriginal community has led to a fierce resistance effort against modern medicine, addiction treatment and perhaps fuels a desire to seek out drugs and illicit substances as a starting point of addiction. Wide scale suspicion against medical practitioners and government representatives has become engendered in the Aboriginal community.
In Enduring Violence: Ladina Women's Lives in Guatemala, the 2011 book by Cecilia Menjívar, it is argued that the preexisting cultural conditions of mediania, or half and half, agriculture led to women facing large scale cultural violence due to high rents, low returns and high required investment with additionally harsh conditions due to the conflict in Guatemala. Given the patriarchal culture of Guatemala, any earnings would go to the partner of the working woman, leaving a large poverty gap enshrined in the demographic diversity of the country.
The Austrian peace researcher Franz Jedlicka has tried to measure the level of cultural violence in a "Culture of Violence Scale" in 2023.
Direct Violence
Direct Violence is characterised as having an actor that commits the violence, and is thus able to be traced back to persons as actors. Direct violence shows less stability, given it is subject to the preference sets of individuals, and thus is more easily recognised. Direct violence is the most visible, occurring physically or verbally, and the victim and the offender can be clearly identified. Direct violence is highly interdependent with structural and cultural violence: cultural and structural violence causes direct violence which on the other hand reinforces the former ones. This concept has been applied in a large number of cases, some of which are listed below.A 2011 paper by the International Center for Research on Women demonstrated the widespread nature of child marriage in South Asia. The ICRW highlighted marriage before the age of 18 as a fundamental human rights violation, one that leads to early childbearing, with significantly higher maternal mortality and morbidity rates as well as higher infant mortality rates amongst women. The paper most directly presented evidence to show that child brides are at heightened risk of violence in the home.
In Matthew Chandler's 2009 paper on so-called "non-violent" techniques utilised by Hezbollah still include forms of Direct Violence, most notably the threat of violence toward Fouad Siniora's allies after his 2008 order to dismantle the Hezbollah telecommunications network in 2008, which led to the freezing of the order. Further, Hezbollah are argued to have used their operation of social services, in lieu of government operations, as a ransom for support as well as rewarding their fighters with guaranteed healthcare and support for their families. Chandler argues this is due to opposition within the group to harming Lebanese civilians, who they view as "their own", or exacerbating conflict through civil war.
In 2005, Steven Wright made the case for Peacekeeping efforts to be regarded as violence due to increasing use of techniques such as pre-interrogation treatment, and the use of non-lethal weapons such as tear gas for crowd dispersal and plastic bullets, which he terms "torture-lite", being increasingly common in peacekeeping manuals across a number of nation-states and supranational organisations.