ABSTRACT
If asked to define “peace” most people end up saying something along the lines of it being the absence of war or violence. But this conception places violence as the central, basic concept, with peace being a secondary, derivative one. While concerns about being free from hostilities are, of course, important for peace, they reflect only what philosophers of peace call “negative peace,” that is, peace in the sense of the absence of hostilities. But at least as important is “positive peace,” the conditions for being free to fulfill one’s potentials. Living in a state of poverty or prejudice or fear or degradation are forms of experiencing a life that is not peaceful. Murder is violent, but so, too, is starvation, at least for the person who is starving. Psychological, emotional, and economic abuses are experienced as violence just as much as physical blows are. To this extent, and for this reason, peace—especially peace as freedom to and not merely as freedom from—is intimately related to justice. Any genuine attempt to understand and promote peace requires addressing issues and questions of injustice, as both a form of violence and a cause of violence. This can include the pain that results from failure to fulfill one’s potentials and aspirations, sometimes caused by direct harm or even injustice perpetrated by others that prevents that fulfillment.
