What is Peace?

The answer may seem so obvious that the question seems stupid. We know that peace is the lack of war—that as long as soldiers are not killing one another, then peace exists. Lack of war may be a necessary condition for peace, but it does not seem a sufficient one.

Reardon (1988) defines peace as “the absence of violence in all its forms—physical, social, psychological, and structural.” But, this is a negative definition: it does not say what peace is. As Ralph Bunche put it in his Nobel Laureate address, “Peace, to have meaning for many who have known only suffering in both peace and war must be translated into bread or rice, shelter, health, and education, as well as freedom and human dignity.” Positive peace is a state of well-being characterized by cooperation, freedom, justice, respect for human rights, and non-violent means of resolving disputes that still arise.

There is the vision of peace in which the “lion lies down with the lamb,” although it leaves unclear just what the lion eats. Enlightenment humanists started with this vision, seeing war arising from “misunderstandings,” so preventable by communication, reason, and trade. Some hoped all cultures would become one; others that many cultures would flourish in harmony. There is the vision of peace maintained by international organizations with enough legitimacy to resolve conflicts through diplomacy. There is the vision of peace through balance of power, in which states form alliances that make war too risky to start. The totalitarian vision achieves peace by elimination of any threat to the supremacy of the state with no consideration of human rights. Ambassador Vernon Walters astutely observed that decades of war and bombs in Vietnam did not suffice to drive the peasants from their hamlets, but the “peace” that came with communist victory drove hundreds of thousands of people into the South China Sea, on anything that could or might float, risking and often suffering dehydration, piracy, and drowning (Nordlinger 2012).