Category: Johan Galtung

Not much peace? It’s also the mediators’ fault

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By Johan Galtung

Not so difficult is to argue against war and militarism, against the suffering in war that may also accrue to oneself, and against the doctrine that the lasting solution to conflict is military victory. Be strong, deter, win; dictate peace does not convince. Nor is it so difficult to argue that solving the underlying conflict is a better approach: engaging antagonist verbally, in dialogue with or without mediation, in a joint search for an acceptable and sustainable solution. A military victory delivers neither one, nor the other.

More difficult is to argue the significance of conciliation, of clearing, closing the wounds of the past, for a future together; the only future there is in a globalizing world. There are so many wounds. Read More »

From Westphalia to World Domestic Policy

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By Johan Galtung

Talk at the Federation of German Scientists – Berlin, Germany

We honor a great German and world citizen, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, born 100 years ago, and his path-breaking motto, World Domestic Policy, Weltinnenpolitik. What might it look like?

But before that, some words about CFvW in meetings around the world of WOMP, the World Order Models Project, brilliantly conceived and organized by Saul Mendlovitz, who sends warm greetings, and Richard Falk, the European representative with CfvW (and me as non-territorial). And as a board member of the Max Planck Institut; close to 20 years older, a father, brother and colleague.Read More »

Italy – A portrait

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By Erica Degortes and Johan Galtung

For quite some time now reading Italian newspapers or listening to news and radio broadcasts turned into an insult not only to information itself but to all Italians. National television channels are literally monopolized by football and all kinds of weather apocalyptic scenarios.

And what about the wide space devoted to the Pope? We wonder what the nearly 1.580.000 Muslims (according to the Caritas-Migrantes 2011 Immigration Statistical Dossier – 1.200.000 according to the World Muslim League) may think about it, not to mention Jews and Buddhists, a large portion of the population about which one never hears.Read More »

Breivik: Living in the historical present (Part II)

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By Johan Galtung

The police explores concrete logistic collaborators and-or ideological support; like Peter Mangs in Sweden, the “laser man” who killed what looked like immigrants, wrote a rightwing manifesto and an autobiography; or “Fjordman” with 111 mentions.

Breivik was a member of a Norwegian rightwing anti-immigration party, Fremskrittspartiet – a legal stand in a democracy – but left. He also left the Free Masons, with the following Compendium comment:

“Being a Free Mason myself I know that /the Freemasons are a Zionist organization/ is not only a false claim but actually quite ridiculous. The Freemasons is not in any way political (I wish the organization was, believe me) and it is true that they have a positive view on Jews. However, this is from a Christian religious context where solidarity to Jews and Israel is important. The Freemasons is a Christian only organization and no Muslim or Jew could become a member even if they wanted to. There are no political bodies within the organization nationally or internationally” (p. 1369).

However, the Freemason lodges Gladio and P2 were behind the 2 August 1980 Bologna massacre, and oaths of loyalty among members may matter.

But Breivik seems to live so much in past history that it attains reality, competing with, even replacing contemporary reality. His references are numerous. There are errors; but more important is to understand his reading of the meaning of history, his history.Read More »

The Arab Spring and the image of Islam

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By Johan Galtung

The multi-season Arab Spring is the third anti-imperialist Arab revolt in less than a century: against the Ottoman empire, the Western Italian-French-English empire, and now the US-Israel empire. The empires hit back. The Ottomans were weak, but England-France-Israel even invaded Egypt in 29 October 1956 – in the shadow of the Hungarian revolt against the Soviet empire that crumbled 23-25 years later. And now it is the turn o USA-Israel to try to maintain an illegitimate structure.

So much for the background. In the foreground is class, pitting the powerless at the bottom against the powerful at the top. Read More »

Breivik – A victim of collective psychosis (1)

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By Johan Galtung

An individual psychosis setting him apart from others, also in daily life, does not seem to fit his case. But there is another form of psychosis that fits his narcissistic hatred and paranoid violence so removed from the average. His psychosis is produced and triggered by the polarization-escalation aspect of conflict, not easily captured by individualizing psychiatry as his daily life attitude and behavior may be (near) normal.

His psychosis is collective, shared. His ego is part of a real or imagined collectivity that may include those higher up; not an individual disorder associated with the deviant lower down. There is a class aspect to psychosis, marginalizing the individual cases, catapulting extremist collective psychopaths into top power.Read More »

Neither capitalism nor socialism: Eclecticism & Peace Economics!

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By Johan Galtung

Thinking aloud: we need all good ideas to combat our double economic crisis: the increasing misery crisis at the bottom, now also in rich countries in the West, and the increasing system crisis, also striking those countries; but both are all over.

So the following are notes for an epilogue to a forthcoming book, Peace Economics, about how to overcome the flagrant structural violence in the misery crisis, and the threat of direct violence, not only terrorism and state terrorism, but a major world war to get the West out of the system – like the Second World War lifted them out of the Great Depression.Read More »

They say war, we think peace

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By Johan Galtung

Talk at the Université de Strasbourg, France, May 21, 2012

Important is not only to think peace, but to speak, write and contribute to making, building and keeping it.

For that purpose a little formula might be useful:

+ Positive Peace Equity X Harmony

Peace = ________________ = _________________

– Negative Peace Trauma X Conflict

There is positive peace in the numerator: the more the better. And key factors leading to direct, structural and cultural violence–the opposite of negative peace–in the denominator: the less the better. What is gained in peace is easily lost through inattention to negative pace. But there is a zone of stability by compensation.

According to the formula there are four basic tasks; all of them difficult but not impossible, all requiring training, skills.Read More »

Rational conflict resolution: What stands in the way?*

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By Johan Galtung

We are facing six conflicts, four current, one past and one future are shaping our present reality. Conflict is a relation of incompatibility between parties; not an attribute of one party. It spells danger of violence and opportunity to create new realities.

Thus, to understand the shoa the narratives of unspeakable German atrocity and infinite Jewish suffering are indispensable. But so are the narratives of German-Jewish relations, Germans to others, Jews to others. Failure to do so blocks rationality: if conflict is in the relation, then the solution is in a new relation. This is not blaming the victim. What matters most is changing the relation. Are we able?Read More »

The politics and benefits of equality

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By Johan Galtung

US politics has for a long time, since the 1970s, been the politics of inequality. Not only have the indicators of inequality, like the ratio in average income between the top and the bottom 20%, or the salary ratio between a CEO and the average employee in a corporation, increased (from 50 to 1100). But the top 10 or 1 or 0.1 percent, has acquired wealth so far unheard of. And the bottom 90, or 99 or 99.1 percent see the average family income in real terms decreasing; for the lowest down below the poverty line, way down into misery like worrying about where the next meal comes from (from the soup kitchen for very many).Read More »