Peace beyond the Absence of War: Three Trends in the Study of Positive Peace

Abstract

Recent years have seen a surge in renewed academic interest in positive concepts of peace. This chapter takes stock of these developments, arguing that three trends can be observed. First, in a quest to make positive peace measurable, additional indicators of peace are added to the absence of war, mostly relying on existing databases. Second, in an attempt to capture the varieties of peace that resonate with inhabitants of postwar countries, authors rely on interviews with various groups to construct locally grounded notions of peace. Third, the ontological status of peace is reconceptualized. Rather than being a (utopian?) state of affairs, peace is said to be a process, an emergent phenomenon, or a quality of relationships between actors. The uptake of these three trends is that we are left with a variety of peace paradigms for local and international peacebuilders to work on. Consequently, special attention should be paid to concepts of peace that resonate with rising powers in peacebuilding and with populations in conflict-affected areas. The chapter concludes that the field of peace studies is maturing into a separate discipline, following a different logic than that of conflict studies, holistic rather than reductionist, bottom-up rather than top-down and focusing on long-term change rather than quick problem-solving.

1. Introduction

In 2016, the International Study Association devoted its annual conference to the topic of “exploring peace,” a call by its president to “look beyond conventional ideas of ‘negative peace,’ typically thought of as the absence of war, and examine the manifestation of ‘positive peace’ in the cases and situations that we study” [1]. A few years before, the president of the Peace Science Society (International) likewise called on the members of his society to “bring peace back in” to their studies of armed conflict and peacebuilding [2]. Both calls seem to have originated in a certain unease with the fact that most academics that study peace are actually studying armed conflict [3, 4]. Some exceptions withstanding, the general consensus among peace researchers seemed, and perhaps still seems, to be a paraphrase of the old Latin adage: if you want to understand peace, study war.

This chapter is about those exceptions. It argues that they are growing in both numbers and depth and that the calls to “bring peace back in” should be seen as part of a renewed interest in the study of peace as a positive phenomenon. That is, as something that extends beyond the absence of war and should be studied as a phenomenon “in and of its own” ([5], p. 177). This renewed interest comes at a time when armed conflict is once again on the rise [6], seemingly thwarting earlier optimism about a decline in violence [7, 8].

It also comes at a time when other authors are arguing that international peacebuilding is experiencing a severe crisis [9, 10]. For the study of (post-conflict) peacebuilding, conceptualizing peace in terms other than an absence of armed conflict seems to be especially appropriate, as the very notion of building peace would seem to presuppose that peace is a positive phenomenon. Building an “absence” of anything seems a priori absurd. Having a more fine-grained concept of peace might lead to a more realistic assessment of what international peacebuilding can and has achieved and thus a better assessment of whether peacebuilding is “in crisis” or merely building a different kind of peace, or different peaces (in the plural, see [11]) than its critics are looking for.

Various authors, in contexts other than peacebuilding operations, have pointed out the need for a concept of peace that can make a distinction between North Korea and Sweden [12], for instance, or between various situations described as “no war, no peace” [13]. Whether the trend of focusing primarily on the study of armed conflict to understand peace has been broken is not yet certain, but the past decade has been rather productive in producing studies that explore peace as a positive phenomenon. This chapter seeks to take stock of this renewed interest in positive peace, exploring three tracks researchers have taken to further our understanding of peace. Adopting a peacebuilding perspective, the chapter presents arguments for fruitful ways in which to combine and/or elaborate on these three tracks. The three paths taken can roughly be characterized as (1) a quantitative track expanding the concept of peace by combining the absence of armed conflict with other databases and indices, for instance, on democracy or various human rights; (2) a local turn asking mostly representatives of marginalized groups in (post-) conflict areas what peace means to them; and (3) a more philosophical approach seeking to understand the ontological nature of peace as something other than a condition at a certain point in space and time. Before going into the details of these three developments, it is important to first briefly revisit the concept of positive peace and the changes it has undergone since its first inception in the 1950s/1960s.

2. Positive peace: a short history

The notion of positive peace is often traced back to two of the founding fathers of peace studies: Quincy Wright and Johan Galtung. Wright was the first to coin the term “positive peace” [14] to describe a situation of integration and cooperation between states in international relations. This idea of cooperation and integration as the antithesis of war was taken up by Johan Galtung in his first exploration of positive and negative peace [15]. He later changed his mind though and famously equated positive peace with the absence of structural—rather than direct or physical—violence, or “structural limitations on the fulfillment of human potential,” sometimes also formulated as the presence of social justice [16, 17].

Over time, other peace researchers have proposed different conceptualizations of positive peace (for an excellent overview, see [12], p. 40-47). Some of these went back to the original meaning attached to the concept by Wright, stressing “harmonious relationships” as a core attribute of peace (see, e.g., [18, 19]). Others have tried to describe a situation of positive peace as the presence of a common legal order or international rule of law [20, 21] or tried to conceptualize peace as a continuum of ever-increasing levels of peacefulness in various domains of human interaction [19, 22, 23, 24].

However, among scholars of peace, it is primarily Galtung’s name that has stuck to the concept of positive peace. His focus on peace as the absence of different kinds of violence has probably helped to keep the discussion of peace closely linked to conflict and violence, rather than studying peace as a phenomenon in and of itself ([12], p. 27). Concerns that more elaborative definitions of peace would be too vague or expansive to be of any practical use in studying the real-world occurrence of peace have reinforced the tendency of peace scholars to focus on conflict and war [12, 25, 26].

In the late 2000s, the need to evaluate the success of United Nations peacebuilding operations, especially the more multidimensional peace operations that did much more than observe cease-fires, led to a renewed interest in definitions of peace beyond the absence of war [27]. It is to these efforts to reconceptualize peace that we now turn, starting with the idea that positive peace equals negative peace plus some additional criteria.

3. The first trend: more data

The first trend that can be observed in more recent efforts to reconceptualize peace as a positive phenomenon is to add additional criteria for a situation to count as one of positive rather than negative peace. Scholars in this first track are mostly concerned with finding operational definitions of peace that allow for systematic analysis and comparison across cases [12]. One of the reasons negative peace is so attractive as a concept is that it is easy to observe. Various institutes host online databases, like the Correlates of War project (COW, https://correlatesofwar.org/), the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP, https://ucdp.uu.se/), or the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED, https://acleddata.com/). All of these keep track of the number of armed conflicts in the world, using precise and widely accepted measures of armed conflict, based on casualty statistics. If the level of violence drops below the specified threshold for armed conflict, (negative) peace prevails.

However, for many comparisons, merely relying on casualty statistics is too crude a measure to capture the diversity of peace in post-settlement societies [28] or the differences between the peacefulness of Sweden and North Korea [12, 29]. For larger-N comparisons, we need some concept of peace, for which indicators exist, that can be measured with the same level of accuracy as the absence of armed conflict. Therefore, authors have searched for other datasets that can capture these additional aspects of peace.

Early attempts in this direction simply added a measure of democracy to distinguish more “participatory” peace from negative peace (e.g., [17, 30, 31, 32]). Although this does make it possible to distinguish peace in Sweden from that in North Korea, the stream of critiques on what is called “liberal peace” by its critics (for example [33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38], see also [11] chapter 2) shows serious challenges with this simple equation of positive peace with some semblance of democracy. In a nutshell, critics argue that state capacity might be more important than democracy for prolonged peace [33], that the notion of democracy (or at least the models implemented in postwar peacebuilding) forces Western concepts and institutions onto non-Western states [36, 37, 39], and that democracy-promotion makes liberal peacebuilding focus too much on national-level politics at the expense of local factors relevant for peace [37, 38, 40].

A more ambitious attempt was made by Madhav Joshi and Peter Wallensteen in a 2016 edited volume [41]. They try to conceptualize the quality of peace in societies emerging from civil war along five dimensions: post-accord security, governance, economic reconstruction, transitional justice, and reconciliation and civil society. They stress that every situation is different and not every dimension is equally important in every situation or at each moment in time. Although they present the diversity of the findings in different case study chapters as a strength of their new concept of peace, they also acknowledge that more data, more theory development, and more rigorous methods are needed to make the concept as clear as the classic notion of negative peace.

Davenport, Melander, and Regan build on the idea of quality peace, as well as Wright’s insistence that peace is best thought of as a continuum, to argue for various interpretations of a “peace continuum” [12]. Their three proposals for a positive concept of peace are all grounded in a solid theoretical approach to peace and measurable by way of indicators that should be able to distinguish different levels of quality peace. They take great care to avoid both the Scylla of an overly narrow definition like the one by Doyle and Sambanis [30] and the Charybdis of overly broad concepts of peace that are impossible to measure, like the ones by De Rivera [18] and Anderson [19]. As an illustration of this rather sophisticated attempt to broaden our understanding of peace, while keeping it measurable, their three proposals will be briefly introduced.

Regan offers the narrowest conceptualization, proposing that we see peace as a situation in which “no actor or group of actors has a unilateral incentive to attempt change by force of arms” ([42], p. 86). This may seem overly biased in favor of stability and keeping the status quo, as well as difficult to measure, but he valiantly tries to overcome these doubts and propose proxy indicators for risk assessment (bond prices and black-market currency exchange rates) that might capture the extent to which actors have such incentives.

His two colleagues propose more expansive definitions of peace, one cleverly constructed as a mirroring of Carl Clausewitz’ famous definition of war as the continuation of policy by other means [43], the other as a continuum ranging from opposition to mutuality along different dimensions of interaction and levels of analysis [44]. Both approaches produce indicators that can be measured using existing databases on, for example, the occurrence of torture, democracy, and women’s rights [43], or citizenship rights and degrees of segregation [44].

A slightly different, but even more ambitious approach, to come up with indicators for positive peace is the Institute for Economics and Peace’s Positive Peace Index [45, 46]. Based on a big data analysis of factors that create and sustain peaceful societies, it identifies no less than eight “pillars of peace” that create and sustain peaceful societies: a well-functioning government, low levels of corruption, acceptance of the rights of others, good relations with neighbors, free flow of information, a sound business environment, the equitable distribution of resources, and high levels of human capital. Each pillar has various indicators to measure a country’s progress on it. If this seems to leave open the question of what constitutes a peaceful society, the same institute also publishes the Global Peace Index measuring peacefulness in terms of a country’s level of safety and security in society, the extent of domestic or international conflict, and the degree of militarization [47].

For all their sophistication, these attempts at operationalizing a measurable concept of peace are not without problems. For one thing, the focus on measurability and country rankings sits somewhat uncomfortably with the idea that peace in different societies is qualitatively different. How can these qualitative differences be accounted for in some quantitative comparison like the Positive Peace Index? Can we really say that a country with high levels of economic growth but low levels of human rights observance (let us say China) is less peaceful than a country that is economically less developed but fares better on the human rights spectrum (like Guyana or, potentially, Bhutan)? Is the United States, with its large levels of gun violence but also a sound business environment and premium internet access, really more peaceful than Costa Rica or Mauritius, two countries in the positive peace index that do not even have a standing army?¹

However, the move to expand the concept of peace beyond the absence of war by integrating various other concerns into it is definitely an interesting one. While the authors working in this track should be applauded for their efforts at methodological rigor, operationalization, and data collection, the track is not without risk. Three main risks are conceptual overstretch, conceptual confusion, and blind spots because of the need for indicators and data.

The first risk is conceptual overstretch. By adding democracy, observance of various human rights, or the IEP’s eight pillars of peace, the risk is that peace becomes a synonym for “all things desirable,” making it impossible theoretically to even describe the relationship between positive peace and things like economic development, human happiness or well-being, and various forms of government. This seems to be a risk most people working with this notion of positive peace are aware of though and seek to limit by proposing only a few indicators and insisting that peace remains a separate concept ([12], p. 29).

The second risk is that indicators drive the underlying concept of peace away from something that can be meaningfully labeled “positive peace” and to the direction of human rights observance, economic development, or economic risk management. For instance, Regan’s concept of peace as a situation in which “no actor or group of actors has a unilateral incentive to attempt change by force of arms’ ([42], p. 186) can still be seen as a positive concept of peace, but his indicators (bond prices and black-market currency exchange rates) push peace into the economic domain, where many actors actually working for peace would not think it belongs (see [11, 48]). Of course, it can be argued that the proposed indicators should explicitly be seen as proxy indicators, but that begs the question of whether these proxies correctly mirror the level of positive peace in a society or are merely selected because of the availability of databases.

Third, by basing their concept of peace on indicators for which data is available, authors in this line of research run the risk of molding peace according to Western practices, as the Global West has the most extensive and highest quality data available. Western countries score consistently higher on all pillars of the positive peace index, but maybe because the index is based on statistics that come mostly from Western countries. It is this third pitfall that the second trend in positive peace research seeks to counteract by calling attention to the concepts of peace that people in the Global South espouse.

4. The second trend: more voices

The second shift in conceptualizing peace can be observed in authors partaking in a “local,” or anthropological, turn, who have started to ask people in conflict-affected areas what peace means to them, in order to come up with more locally legitimate notions of peace. The local turn is a hotly debated topic among peacebuilding scholars [49, 50, 51, 52]. Those debates will not be summarized here; rather the focus is on the key development relevant for exploring peace: the trend to ask people in conflict-affected areas what peace means to them in their everyday lives. In the past 10 years, studies have been published on the meanings that indigenous peoples [53, 54], young people [55], women [56, 57], or more generally people in local communities in conflict-affected areas [48, 58, 59] or traditional peaceful societies [60] attach to peace.

One of the most ambitious projects in this regard has been the effort to “reclaim” everyday peace by developing a set of Everyday Peace Indicators that can serve as a yardstick for measuring peacebuilding success [48, 61, 62]. These indicators were established in a two-step bottom-up process using focus groups from particular conflict-affected communities in Colombia and Uganda. First, people were asked what peace means to them and how they know whether there is more peace or less peace in their community. The list of possible indicators derived from these interviews was then narrowed down to ten indicators for everyday peace that a focus group from the community had to agree on. These indicators were subsequently used in longitudinal surveys to establish whether peace was increasing or decreasing over time in this particular community ([48], pp. 68–76).

Although presented as a tool to improve the measurement of peacebuilding success in external evaluations, the Everyday Peace Indicators project also has consequences for how peace is conceptualized. One of the more interesting findings in this respect is that the indicators, and thus the meaning attached to peace, not only are different for different communities but also change over time [48, see also 63]. This presents problems not only for peacebuilders who might have to adapt their programs to fit these shifts in objectives but even more so for researchers who want to study the development of peace over time and/or in different parts of the world, like the academics in the first track identified above.

One other striking aspect of these studies is that often the (explicit) objective of them is to “give a voice to people who have not been heard before” [64]: the victims of armed conflict, in particular marginalized groups like youth or women. Lee [58] is an exception in that he also included former Khmer Rouge combatants in his study of everyday peace in Cambodia, but often the focus seems to be on making additional voices heard, rather than on finding consensus between different groups or actors. While this is certainly laudable, and a much-needed correction on overly Western-centric conceptualizations of peace, it would be interesting to apply the same methodology to Western peacebuilders. Doing so could establish a dialog between local and external peacebuilders that would allow both sides to see some new perspectives, rather than maintaining the divide between warzones and what Severine Autesserre has called “peaceland” [65] or the fiction of a unified liberal peace consensus [34, 66]. The works of Van Iterson Scholten [11] who interviewed professional peace workers rather than victims of conflict and Caplan [26] who studied the meanings that different international organizations attach to peace are promising points of entry for such a dialog.

5. The third trend: A different ontology

The third way authors have tried to find new meanings for positive peace is by moving away from the idea that peace is a certain condition, or situation, in a particular country at a certain moment in time. While this idea of peace as a state of affairs is highly attractive, if we want to measure it, it just might not reflect the ontological status of the phenomenon in reality. Or, to put it in slightly less controversial terms, changing the ontology of our concepts of peace provides new insights into how it can be achieved. There are three main routes for this ontological reorientation: defining peace as a process, as an emergent phenomenon, and as a relationship.

The first, peace as a process, is the oldest of the three (for an early formulation, see [67]). Authors studying nonviolence [68, 69, 70] or conflict transformation [71, 72] stress that conflicts do not necessarily need to be resolved for peace to occur, but rather that peace is about the way in which conflicts are handled. The quote that “there is no way to peace, peace is the way,” ascribed (apocryphally) to both Gandhi and the Buddha, nicely sums up this approach.

More recent contributions to this line of thinking have stressed the need for an “agonistic” understanding of peace [73, 74, 75, 76, 77]. Building on the work of Carl Schmitt and Chantal Mouffe, these authors argue that peace consists of the transformation of antagonistic (openly hostile) conflicts into agonistic ones, in which the opponent is thought of as an “adversary” rather than an enemy. In order to achieve this, structures should be put in place that channel conflicts between adversaries along nonviolent paths. Especially the work of Lisa Strömbom and colleagues should be mentioned here, who valiantly try to operationalize this idea into an analytical framework [75, 76, 77].

In the 2015 review of its peacebuilding architecture, the United Nations has also taken up the idea that peace is more a continuous process than a goal to be achieved [78]. This insight has led to a new literature on “sustaining peace” (see, e.g., [79, 80, 81, 82]). At the core of the sustaining peace agenda are two ideas. Peacebuilding should be focused more on prevention of violent conflict than on handling the aftermath of violent conflict, and it requires a more holistic approach than the UN has taken to date ([82], pp. 15–16). Peace is something that requires upkeep, or “perpetual peacebuilding” [83], also in countries not immediately affected by war. Although this is still often framed in terms of preventing armed conflict, one interesting consequence of reconceptualizing peace as a process is that it allows us to see that also in countries where war seems “unthinkable” ([84], p. 13), sustaining peace still requires governments to invest in peace as a positive project. In this respect, it is like the Sustainable Development Goals, which also require action by all governments, not only by governments in the Global South.

One other aspect of peace that is stressed by authors writing about sustaining peace is the idea that peace is not so much the result of deliberate policies or actions, but “emerges” out of a complex web of social interaction among a host of different actors [79]. This idea of peace as an “emergent phenomenon” is the second interesting reconceptualization now taking place [79, 85, 86, 87]. Drawing on complexity theory, authors working with this concept of peace suggest that peace is best thought of as a stable equilibrium in a complex system. Complex systems are defined by three characteristics: holism, nonlinearity, and self-organization ([79], p. 168). Holism means that the properties of individual elements of a social system (individuals or groups) are co-determined by the properties of the system as a whole. To put it (perhaps too) bluntly: people in a democracy behave differently from those in an autocracy. Hence, analysis should not start from (rational) individuals or social groups but should take into account the feedback loops between the individual and the system level.

One of the consequences of these feedback loops is that causality takes a nonlinear form, meaning that the output of a system can be disproportional to its input. A small peacebuilding initiative may have large consequences but may equally have effect only in the longer term, or have one effect at one point in time but another effect at another point in time. This nonlinearity makes it difficult to predict the outcomes of any specific peacebuilding intervention.

Finally, complex systems are self-organizing, meaning that the feedback loops tend to push the system toward a state of equilibrium, even in the absence of specific planning or (foreign) intervention. Thinking about peace as an emergent property of complex systems makes concepts like the local [49, 50, 51], friction [87], resilience [88], and hybridity [89] even more relevant. As de Coning notes, if the system is self-organizing, intervention can also be seen as an interruption preventing such organization ([79], pp. 174–175).

The complexity approach to peace has two main drawbacks. The first is that it becomes extremely difficult to identify the factors that lead to successful peacebuilding. If peace is some emergent phenomenon arising more or less spontaneously out of complex interactions between a myriad of actors and factors (both local and international, if those categories still make sense in a complex system), it becomes hard, if not a priori impossible, to pinpoint which of these exactly lead to success. The most one can do is either analyze which characteristics of a system correlate to a situation of peace (as the Positive Peace Index purports to do) or reconstruct the factors that led to success after the fact. But since no two complex situations are alike, it becomes virtually impossible to draw lessons from past peacebuilding experiences. Or, to make the point even more pressing, if peace is something that emerges autonomously from complex interactions, efforts to actively “build” it may always go amiss. This might seem like a philosophical underpinning of the argument that peacebuilding is in crisis [9, 10] or that war should be given a chance [90].

The second problem with this approach is that for all its stress on complexity and emerging properties, it is not very clear what exactly constitutes this “emerging” peace, other than a situation in which no regular fighting occurs: negative peace. By limiting peace to a stable state of the system, even if this comes in the form of a dictatorship, we once again lose sight of a positive definition of peace that is more than the (self-organized) absence of war.

Here is where another set of scholars, some of whom are also interested in complexity, come in [44, 91, 92, 93, 94]. Rather than focusing on characteristics of the system in which actors operate, they investigate the relationships between actors and conceptualize peace as a quality of these relationships. The more relationships between two actors are characterized by symbiosis [92] or by cooperation, non-domination, and trust [93], the more peaceful this relationship is.

There are five advantages to defining peace in relational, rather than conditional, terms. First, it relates peace much closer to power, which is also a relational concept. Second, it draws attention to the crucial role played by reconciliation and trust-building in establishing sustainable peace. Third, it reminds us that war and peace are ontologically different and hence can coexist at the same time and place. Even in a situation of war, people can still experience peaceful relations with others, a point developed in the literature on everyday peace as well [e.g., 95]. Fourth, it matches the way people in conflict-affected areas themselves define peace. In the Everyday Peace Indicators project alluded to above, relational indicators were the second most common kind mentioned, after security-related ones ([62], p. 7). Fifth, defining peace in relational terms makes it easier to study its occurrence across different levels of analysis. Individuals can have (everyday) peaceful relations with other individuals, even if the relations between their respective ethnic groups are more hostile. States have relations with other states, as well as with the people living in their state, and predatory elites can do a lot of damage to the relationship people experience with their own state. Finally, international interventions build new relationships between those intervening and those intervened upon. Relational peace offers a framework that can accommodate all of these.

Despite its potential, the reconceptualization of peace into a quality of relationships is not without problems. The first of these is epistemological. How do we know whether a relationship between two actors is peaceful or not, other than by looking at the behavior that characterizes their interactions? If the two are fighting, their relationship is obviously not peaceful, but if not, how can we tell just how peaceful their relationship is? Or whether there is a relationship at all, and the two are not just ignoring each other? Söderström and colleagues [93] propose two other components of relational peace, subjective attitudes toward the other and the idea actors have of the relationship, and provide some categories that can be used to classify these but do not really discuss the validity or operationalization of these categories. More work needs to be done here.

Second, if relations extend beyond individuals to inter-group relations, what are the boundaries of these groups? Individual people often have different overlapping identities, but if peace is conceived as a collective phenomenon depending on the quality of relationships between groups, how can the boundaries between these groups be drawn? If the groups are ethnic (a relatively easy and often occurring case), what to do with people who are of mixed ethnic origin? Or with people who do not identify (primarily) with their ethnic group or who reject the concept of different ethnic groups altogether? Any distinction between social groups runs a risk of essentializing those groups, but without some sort of differentiation between groups, it becomes extremely difficult to say anything at all about the relationships between them. And given the interconnectedness of groups at the local, national, regional, and international levels, it becomes very challenging to compare cases.

6. Toward a mature field of peace studies

So far, this chapter has sketched three different tracks that research into positive peace has taken over the past 10, maybe 15 years. By analytically separating these tracks and showing the advantages and disadvantages of each, this chapter strives to have contributed to the building of better notions of peace along each of them. But if some of the brush between the paths has been cleared and people along the tracks can once again clearly see each other, the question remains what the way forward should look like. Three suggestions are provided.

The first is to really start treating peace as a word with a plural [96]. Researchers should take seriously the idea that peace is not just an essentially contested concept, but that it might be more fruitful to make some distinctions between different kinds of peace. Doing so would allow researchers to identify both what kind of peace is most urgently needed in a specific (post-) conflict area (or frozen conflict, or pre-conflict situation) and what kind of peace different kinds of peacebuilders (both local and international) can actually bring. Elsewhere, I have proposed both a five-fold distinction of different visions of peace, based on what professional peace workers say they are working on ([11], chapter 3), and a more coarse-grained distinction between (political) Security Council peace and (cultural, societal, or even individual) UNESCO peace ([11], pp. 212–214). Other authors have proposed different distinctions with different numbers of “peaces” [24, 97, 98]. The point is not so much to settle on a specific number, or to draw rigid boundaries between them, but rather to acknowledge that different peacebuilders build different peaces. Peace education is not going to lead to the signing of a peace agreement in the foreseeable future, but neither is peace agreement implementation (no matter how “comprehensive” the accord) going to lead to a genuinely felt desire for reconciliation and a culture of peace among the wider population. What academics should do is find out how these different peaces are connected to one another, either strengthening each other or working at cross-purposes. The Varieties of Peace research program at the University of Umeå is one interesting development in this regard, as it actively seeks to further a research agenda taking into account situational, relational, and ideational conceptualizations of peace [98].

Second, academics should look beyond the Global West for existing ideas about peace. If we think of peace as a relational phenomenon, rather than a state of affairs, non-Western philosophies may offer interesting insights. Especially Eastern philosophy also focuses more on relationships rather than on entities and may bring useful insights for how to further peace [99]. Along the same lines, the interesting work of Call and de Coning on rising powers and peacebuilding [100] should be elaborated with an exploration of the philosophical backgrounds these rising powers bring to their peacebuilding efforts. Likewise, the exploration of everyday peace can be deepened by considering the many different ways that local traditions in conflict-affected areas conceptualize peace. Some work in this field has already been done [53, 101, 102, 103], but more effort is required to connect it to the literature on peacebuilding and make it operational.

Although the diversity of peace probably warrants scrutiny of the ideas of peace prevalent in many different societies, two areas would seem to be particularly urgent. On the one hand, it would be interesting to look at future “providers” of peace in the world. This makes Chinese visions of peace and related concepts a very interesting area to study. By all accounts, China is going to be a, if not the, major power in the 21st century, so studying its ideas about peace and peacebuilding might help us understand the way UN peacebuilding is going to evolve [100, 104, 105].

On the other hand, and following the cue of the local turn, African ideas about peace also ought to receive much more attention. Most armed conflicts still take place in Africa, and whereas we should not fall in the trap of treating all these conflicts (or indeed all of Africa, probably the most diverse continent on earth) as somehow similar, much can be learned from studying African ideas of peace [101, 102, 106].

The third way forward is to stop thinking of peace as something closely related to either violence or conflict. Violence is merely a symptom of conflict run amok, as the conflict transformation literature has been arguing for a long time, and conflict can also be productive. However, the main lesson we can draw from this review of positive peace is that conflict and peace might have two different “logics”. Hence, efforts to mirror Clausewitz’ analysis of war [43] or Galtung’s conflict triangle [28] are not necessarily the best way forward for the study of positive peace. Just like the study of conflict has provided us with models for conflict analysis, conflict transformation tools, and many other insights into the working of conflicts, the study of peace, as a phenomenon in and of itself, should provide us with models for peace analysis and valuable insights for peacebuilding. To demonstrate, I will end this chapter with three differences between an approach focused on (analyzing or ending) conflict and an approach focused on (analyzing or building) peace. Three things seem to be especially worth noticing about these different approaches.

First, both the practice and analysis of conflict is geared toward finding differences between actors. A conflict approach has a binary logic, separating one side from the other and trying to get a clear view of where both sides differ. Conflict analysis is quite clear on this: the aim is to identify actors, their allies, the incompatibilities between their positions, and their underlying goals and positions [107].

Peacebuilders, on the other hand, seek to identify not just what different actors have in common but more broadly to overcome a focus on incompatibilities and oppositions. Peacebuilding is often presented as a holistic enterprise that seeks to take all elements of a situation into account. If peace is an emergent phenomenon arising from a complex set of interactions in nonlinear ways, then analysts of peacebuilding ought to have attention for all the little details that make up a conflict situation and should always be on the lookout for other factors that further complicate the picture. In that sense, academics studying peace have more in common with historians than with social scientists.

Second, scholars of conflict and conflict resolution practitioners often take a top-down approach, by focusing on the incompatibilities and demands of political leaders, as well as high-level negotiations, the signing of peace agreements and political interventions like democracy promotion, rule of law, and state building. This is a point well noted by many critics of international peacebuilding (e.g., [37, 40, 61]), but my argument would be that this top-down approach is an inherent part of any strategy that focuses on violent conflict as the main obstacle to peace. After all, the easiest way to resolve, transform, or mitigate violent conflict is via the leadership that drives the conflict.

In contrast, peacebuilders take a bottom-up approach, focusing on civil society, infrastructures for peace, and what ordinary people can do to promote peace. Rather than trying to find solutions for a particular incompatibility, peacebuilding tries to inculcate the population against conflict entrepreneurs and delegitimizes the use of violence to achieve any objective. This is a long-term strategy that requires a different mindset than international actors operating in conflict zones often have [65].

Third, and perhaps somewhat surprisingly, because of its focus on bringing out incompatibilities, the logic of conflict is better suited to address issues of injustice and demands for (radical) change. If a group feels they are subject to historical injustices, naturally they want to get attention for their cause, rally supporters (both within their own country and internationally), and show that they are being treated differently from other groups in society. This fits very well with a (nonviolent) conflict approach.

In contrast, peacebuilding is more geared toward stability and slow change in the status quo. Being holistic and bottom-up, there is no principled objection to including ever more perspectives and voices, but there is also plenty of attention for other groups and how demands for radical change might impact them. This is probably a drawback of this approach for practitioners who want to see (or need to show) quick results. It is, however, entirely in line with what peace practitioners have been saying for decades: peace is a slow and never-ending process.

Acknowledgments

This chapter was originally written as an introduction to the course The other side of conflict: peace beyond the absence of war, which I teach at the University of Amsterdam. I want to thank all students who have participated in this course over the years for their enthusiasm and thoughtful reflection on previous drafts.