hi everyone and welcome to core chicks class where we analyze and review some of the major topics in global politics today we're going to be looking at the concept of peace in global politics and the idea of peace is a pretty contested one because the end of the day what does it mean for there to actually be peace can we consider peace to be merely an absence of violence or does there need to be a series of conditions that create a more peaceful way of life and maybe that's more what we can consider to be peace one of the most important figures in the idea of Peace Studies and Peace Research is Norwegian sociologist Johan galtung who we kind of considered to be the father of modern Peace and Conflict Studies and the ideas about Peace Research that he developed can be applicable from the community level like even terms of things like schoolyard bullying all the way up to interstate war Galton's definition of peace has two crucial components first to Galton peace is the absence or reduction of violence of all kinds and second piece is the nonviolent and creative conflict transformation the Galton conflicts will always exist and they can't necessarily ever really be resolved but they can be transformed in a way that conflicts can be dealt with without necessarily having to resort to violence so then what's also important is that we understand what we mean by violence and Dalton define violence as being one of three different and distinct types the first type of violence or what Dalton direct violence is the violence that we can see so in the case of states going to war when they're using their military technology to kill each other that's direct violence in the school yard it's when the bully is shaking down a younger student for their lunch money right that's also the direct violence and that's the violence that's visible and that's what we can see but the other two types of violence are invisible or they're the types of violence that we can't necessarily see but create the conditions that allow direct violence to happen the first of these invisible types of violence is what Galton called structural violence and structural violence is all of the inequalities that we have in society that create those conditions for violence for direct violence to happen so things like being equality between the wealthy and the poor well where the wealthy have access to better infrastructure better resources that the poor might not in a society or the inequality of gender in society that can create these possibilities for direct violence to happen and then finally the third type of violence that Dalton explained was cultural violence and it's these elements of a culture or an ideology that are used to justify violence to happen so when you have this reduction of these different kinds of violence you're on the road to peace and on the road to a positive conflict transformation but be an amount of these types of violence that you are able to reduce can vary the actual kind of peace that you have and so therefore Galton also explained peace as two different kinds of peace the first is negative peace where for the most part the only type of violence that you've reduced is that direct violence so the absence of that visible direct violence creates a negative peace where you know there's no killing or there's no fighting happening but there's still conflict and there's still the possibility of the current peaceful situation to erupt into a more direct violent conflict an example of this might be the current situation in North and South Korea where the two sides aren't actually directly involved in fighting or violence with each other but the conditions for the conflict are still very much there technically both sides are still at war even though they're not directly fighting each other and that conflict is over the Korean Peninsula and who should have control over that territory where both the north and the south claim their right to being the dominant government of Korea right so those underlying conditions are still there but there isn't direct violence between the two sides so we can consider that a negative peace another example of that is the situation between Israel and Palestine where Israel has granted the Palestinian Authority's sovereignty over their territories but Palestine still isn't a fully sovereign state recognized by the global community which is what they want and those territorial concerns continue to create the underlying conditions that allow for violence to happen and on occasion both sides do enter into limited amounts of violent conflict with one another positive peace on the other hand eliminates not only that direct violence but also the indirect and the less visible types of violence so when you have a reduction in structural violence and when you have a reduction in cultural violence you might be on the road to a more positive peace so an example of that might be Western Europe after the Second World War where after the atrocities of World War two European states realize that working together might be more fruitful for the future and laid the groundwork for the European Union and today's European Union it might be seen as an organization that helps foster this idea of positive peace and tries to eliminate those underlying issues between states that they can see that there's benefits to working together and it's a positive relationship between most of those states in the European Union another example could be the Reconstruction era after the u.s. Civil War where the US government actively tried to mitigate as many of those underlying issues between the northern states and southern states in order to usher in a more peaceful United States unified United States moving forward however as we know the extent to which we've actually achieved that harmony with these different actors remains to be seen there's definitely still some elements of conflict in all of these examples but the ability to resolve those conflicts without resorting to violence is definitely different when there's conflicts between European States we don't see them going to war with one another anymore we see a more nonviolent approach to conflict resolution even if it means leaving the European Union entirely as the case of Great Britain all of this definitely leads to some pretty significant questions about peace and for example is negative peace necessarily negative or is that absence of direct violence in some situations all that we can hope for because those underlying issues are so ingrained in those societies that would be really difficult to move beyond them and to what extent is positive peace possible in a world where we have significant structural inequalities in all different levels be it in economics or in gender relations or any numerous other inequalities that we have in society and the big question is how can we transform these conflicts to encourage that healing of those underlying structural issues and to Galton this meant approaching things with creativity and with imagination and that each conflict because of all these different cultural elements structural elements is going to be different and requires a different approach but we can learn from previous conflicts and apply some of those learnings moving forward to create hopefully more sustainable peace and so to sum up these ideas go back to Johan Galton and his ideas how he concluded them is that the proof of the pudding is in the eating the test of a marriage is when the going gets rough the test of peace is in the ability to handle conflict without recourse to violence and conflict will always come up but in societies that have peace we see that conflict resolved without necessarily having to resort to violence and to gall tongue and the idea of peace and conflict research that is the aspiration that we should have moving forward as well thank you for watching and we'll see you again next time