The paradox of Peace

Every year, the twenty-first of September marks the International Day of Peace. It was proposed forty-five years ago, in 1981, by the president of Costa Rica at the time to the United Nations. Originally, it only aimed to commemorate and strengthen ideals of peace both within and among all nations and peoples; in 2001 it also became a call for global ceasefire and for non-violence.

In these past few years, some may argue that violence seems to be increasing between nations, across regions, within states, and at the micro scale of neighbourhoods, streets, and households. By most counts, 2025 was one of the deadliest years for armed conflict since the Cold War. If that is the case, then, what is meant by peace?

The man widely regarded as the father of peace studies, Johan Galtung (1964), offered a distinction between types of peace that has widely influenced the field. He split peace into two types.

Negative peace consists in the absence of direct violence, and the absence of the contradictions and attitudes that sustain conflict within a state’s society and/or between states. The absence of overt violent conflict, war, is therefore what corresponds to negative peace. A call for a global ceasefire is then a call for negative peace.

Positive peace consists not merely in the absence of “war”, but in the absence of structural violence, and of violence in all its forms, over the long term. It is achieved by removing the factors that lead to violence, and by building cooperative, mutually responsive relationships that sustain peace.

It is worth noting that these terms are concerned with state to state and internal aspects and are assumed to trickle down into everyday aspects of life. Also, that the thinking behind these terms had already been reached in 1907 by the pioneer of world peace, Jane Addams, and echoed in the political and social framework of Martin Luther King in 1963.

On Peacemaking, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding:

These three terms are used as distinct but connected tools to manage, resolve and prevent violence. Peacemaking refers to the process of negotiating and dialogue aimed at reaching a settlement, or a defined decision, that ends violence in all its forms.

Peacekeeping comes after it, as it refers to the intervention of an impartial, neutral third party to separate the disputing groups and keep them apart long enough for an agreement to hold. This is, for the most part, what the United Nations was meant to do along Lebanon’s southern border. Now the issue with peacekeeping is that, though it is necessary for deescalation, it does not resolve violence. Dennis Jett, a former US ambassador, writes in 2019 that the UN’s older missions (including the force in southern Lebanon) provide “only the illusion of peace”.

Peacebuilding is the slowest and most demanding of the three, as it requires the construction of positive peace, grounded in justice, fairness, recognition, reconciliation, and forgiveness. It aims towards sustainability, to ensure there is no return to the recourse to violence.

Rejecting violence:

Returning to Galtung’s framework, the manifestations of violence vary as mentioned: direct violence, structural violence, and cultural violence.

Direct violence consists in the acts, words, attitudes, structures, or systems that cause bodily, psychological, social or environmental harm. Structural violence consists in the existence of systems and structures that serve one group or category more than the rest. Providing more resources and opportunities, which is to say, inequality and the absence of justice within social, political, and economic systems. As for cultural violence, it consists of the harnessing of tradition, religion, the exploitation of ideology, and the use of language, art, and the empirical and abstract sciences in order to justify violence, or to lend legitimacy to direct and structural violence.

Overall, contradiction in attitudes is a primary cause in the escalation of conflict; so is the scarcity of resources, inequality, the unjust distribution of wealth and of natural resources, and the failure of balanced development within the structure of a state.

The extremist behaviours and violent practices of certain parties, meanwhile, lead to the outbreak of conflict and the worsening of violence within the society of states and/or within them. Such behaviours take many forms, such as killing, physical harm, threat, intimidation, coercion, and compulsion.

The attitude is expressed through parties and/or sects’ mistaken perceptions of one another, entrenching in the mind a degrading stereotype of the Other. This surely produces feelings of marginalization, humiliation, and belittlement, which further aggravate the causes of conflict and give rise to the idea of resorting to violence as one of the mechanisms of self-preservation and self-defence in the Freudian school of psychoanalysis.

Towards peace for Lebanon:

Greater Lebanon has not been blessed with sustainable peace since its founding in 1920, and its makers did not work to strengthen the building of civic relationships and a unified civil identity that would support the idea of peace, nor its preservation, its construction, and its endurance.

In the interval between the ratification of the Constitution on the 23rd of May 1926 declaring Lebanon as a democratic parliamentary state, and the official declaration of independence on the 22nd of November 1943, together with the framing of the “National Pact”, the formula by which the Lebanese of their various sects agreed upon a mode of ‘coexistence’, no activation of the concept of (positive) peace was known.

Political sectarianism formed the launching point of muhasasa (quota-sharing), clientelism, the absence of integrity, and the lack of transparency. Feudalism shifted from class and wealth to sect; political inheritance became a model to be emulated among the sect-lords, the muqata’jiyya (feudal powerbrokers), old and new, all of which drove the concept of peace out of the language of politics, economics, society, and unfortunately even religion.

So, where does Lebanon stand?

Over the past two decades the Institute for Economics and Peace built instruments to measure negative and positive peace. The Global Peace Index measures negative peace through indicators around absence of violence, conflict, and militarization, and the Positive Peace Index, which measures eight pillars. These tools and terms we have been using are evidently not sufficient to measure or understand everyday peace and its plurality, but they mirror a concerning reality. For example, the global average has worsened for the past twelve years.

The eight pillars of the PPI are: a well-functioning government, a sound business environment, an equitable distribution of resources, acceptance of the rights of others, good relations with neighbours, a free flow of information, high levels of human capital, and low levels of corruption. These pillars are meant to form a structure, meaning that a deficiency in one reflects on the other pillars as well.

In the case of Lebanon, for example, Transparency International’s 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index gave Lebanon a score of 23 out of 100 for public-sector corruption, ranking it 153rd of 182 countries. This may not be surprising, but the question here becomes: how can Lebanon use this data to restructure and work towards positive peace?

Overcoming the fear of peace:

Recall cultural violence, where language shapes, even if subconsciously, what we believe, how we perceive, and what we take to be possible.

Consider, then, the links between words, particularly using root morphology in Arabic. The term salām (peace), belongs to the same root as the word istislām (surrender). The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein describes that names are often held together by a web of overlapping likenesses, the way members of a family share, which he calls family resemblances. Perhaps, then, there exists an implicit association or a resemblance between peace and surrender within our culture.

Then, is the fear of peace a fear and rejection of surrender? If so, how can we reconcile these two and recognize what sacrifices are necessary for the sustainability of positive peace?

On this Day of Peace, perhaps we call for both negative and positive peace, through an open invitation towards recognition, reconciliation, and towards the patient, strategic work of imagining and building peace.