Positive Peace

Concepts of Positive and Negative Peace

A positive understanding of peace has been implicit in the term for peace in many cultures. The Greek word eirene meant not only the cessation of hostilities between states but an organized common peace. The Roman pax meant an order governed by laws and common citizenship. The Hebrew word shalom comes from a root meaning “wholeness” and has connotations of well-being, social peace, and living in accordance with God's will. The Christian sense of the peace of Christ carries this forward and evokes the idea of the community of Christendom. The close idea of reconciliation means “to make whole again.” The Muslim word salaam also echoes the Hebrew concept. It means peace with Allah, with one's neighbors, and oneself. The Indian shanti embraces inner harmony and avoidance of harm, while the Chinese heping denotes harmony in society and with nature. A positive, though variously interpreted, meaning to peace seems to be part of our common heritage.

As Europe became secular and organized in sovereign states, the understanding of peace began to change. At the domestic level, the king's peace implied a state of law and order. Between states, relations were either in a state of war or a state of peace. Hugo Grotius elaborated this distinction and international law embodied it. Complete peace became a distant goal. While Desiderius Erasmus had sought to ground peace and tolerance between Lutherans and Catholics on reason and common Christianity, Immanuel Kant looked to a future state of perpetual peace, outside the frame of existing state relations. Peace required voluntary consent to an agreement to abstain from wars between states, on the basis of reason and a moral imperative. Thomas Hobbes similarly saw peace as far from the present state of affairs. Peace meant only the time when states were neither fighting nor being predisposed to fight. Given the nature of sovereignty, this predisposition was ever present in anarchic systems, and so the normal state of Europe was one of war. Thus, political theorists relegated positive peace to a remote future in which people either consented to renounce war or accepted a common sovereign.

In the deadly context of European wars, however, negative peace seemed enough to strive for. A generation shocked by the destruction of World War I founded international relations as an academic inquiry into the conditions of war and peace. They wanted to understand the causes of wars and find a basis for peaceful settlement of disputes and peaceful change. After World War II, when realists became dominant in international relations, this became the central research question for peace studies. The most urgent concern was how to prevent a global war, wrote the editors of the Journal of Conflict Resolution, in the first issue [Page 2079]in 1957. Researchers on the correlates of war aimed to reduce the frequency of wars. Others, such as Anatol Rapoport, aimed to eliminate war as an institution. In the early years of the nuclear age, when warfare appeared to threaten human survival, the top priority was to secure the absence of war.

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