Twelve Friendly Quarrels with Johan Galtung

KENNETH. E. BOULDING
University of Colorado
A review of Johan Galtung, 1975 and 1976, Essays in Peace Research:
Vol. 1, Peace, Research, Education, Action; Vol. II, Peace, War and Defense.
Copenhagen, Christian Ejlers, 406 pp. and 472 pp.

This article reviews the first two volumes of the collected papers of Johan Galtung. The papers
reveal Galtung as a major world thinker in the field of peace research and conflict studies.
The review takes issue with him, however, on a number of points relating to such matters as
his concept of entropy, the misleading metaphors of negative peace and structural violence,
and his inability to resolve the conflict between liberty and equality. His distinction between
associative and dissociative solutions to conflict is recognized as a major contribution, but his
neglect of the virtues of dissociative solutions is criticized. Galtung’s overall contribution,
however, is very highly regarded.

There are some people like Picasso whose ence in English (not his native language),

output is so large and so varied that it is
hard to believe that it comes from only one
person. Johan Galtung falls into this cate-
gory. These two substantial volumes of re-
printed papers are only the first of five and
perhaps They are the product of a
more.
man of enormousvitality and imagination,
whose work, though centered firmly in so-
ciology, straddles a number of different
fields. He shoots off ideas like an exploding
rocket. He writes for the international audi-
with this invited article by Kenneth Bould-
ing, the Journal of Peace Research publishes the
first of what we hope will become a semi-regular
feature: major ’review essays’ of particularly im-
portant books or series of books. While we do not
feel that we have the space for regular book re-
views, apart from our brief ’book notes’, we feel
a need to discuss in depth occasional works of
particular importance to peace research. It is in
no way accidental that the first selection is the
two first volumes of essays by Johan Galtung,
many of which were first published in this
journal. (In fact, some of these essays made the
journal.) It is, however, coincidental that Galtung,
editor of the JPR during its first ten years, now
leaves the editorial committee. We are confident
that this does not end his association with the
Journal, as contributor, advisor, and friendly
critic.
but apart from occasional lapses into socio-
logical jargon, he writes with a fluency,
style and clarity which could well be the
envy of those who learned English at their
mother’s knee. Because his work has been
scattered in articles rather than condensed
in treatises, these volumes are particularly
welcome and they give the reader a very
fair sample of the range of Galtung’s
thought. We will all look forward, indeed,
to the remaining volumes to fill out the pic-
ture. Some repetitiveness, of course, is inev-
itable in a collection of this kind, but, as
much of what Galtung has ’to say is worth
saying more than once, a certain redundan-
cy does not detract from the value of the
volumes.
It is virtually impossible to review in de-
tail a collection as rich and diverse as the
thirty-three papers contained in these two
volumes. The essays are classified roughly
by topi.c, though there is naturally a good
deal of overlap. In the first volume there is
an introductory section, mainly theoretical,
on peace in general; then a section on peace
research; one on peace education; one on
peace action. The second volume is more
specific and sociological. There is a section
on war and arms races, which is mainly
76
Figure 1.
theoretical; one on public opinion and dis-
armament, which is mainly sociological-
empirical ; a section on peacekeeping, peace-
making and peacebuilding, which is mainly
reports; and a section on nonmilitary de-
fense, whi~ch is mainly sociological and
theoretical. The third volume promises to be
more theoretical still; the fourth volume will
be on world structure, and the fifth on case
studies -
these have not yet been published.
I respect and admire Galtung; I have pro-
fited from his friendship. Nevertheless, I do
find myself in quite sharp disagreement with
many of his positions, and perhaps the most
useful thin I can do in this review is to ex-
plain these disagreements, even at the cost
of sounding a little cantankerous and per-
sonal. Galtung himself is fond of putting
things in matrices, so I will begin with one
to try ;to place both Galtung and myself in
a setting (Figure 1). Here I postulate three
broad types of theoretical approach to the
world, which I have called the ’structural’,
the ’dialectical’ land the ’evolutionary’. Then
I have classified each of these as to whether
a taboo of some sort on violence was im-
portant in the thought of ’the writer.
Strudtural theorists think mainly in terms
of static patterns and forms. Even when they
try to be dynamic they end up with four-
dimensional structures in space-time, like
celestial mechanics or econometrics. They
tend to ’be a little uneasy with dynamics,
however, and tend to evaluate the world in
terms of the structures which it exhibits at
a moment of time. I put Galtung rather
firmly in this category, among those who
have a taboo on violence. Many of the
workers in quantitative peace research and
’polymetrics’ really fall into this category,
such as Rudolph J. Rummel, David Singer,
and evenLewis F. Richardson, the English
meteorologist who in many ways was the
father of peace research. Structural thinkers
with no taboo on violence are, of course,
many. I use Talcott Parsons as an example,
for in many ways I think Galtung’s ithought
is Parsonian. But Max Weber, Walras, Vil-
fredo Pareto, and many other highly re-
spectable social scientists can be put, with a
little pushing and stretching, into this pi-
geonhole.
The second category is that of dialectical
theorists who see the world primarily in
terms of the interaction through struggle of
large structures, such as classes or nations.
Of those without a taboo on violence, Marx,
Lenin and Mao may of course be the most
famous, but one might also put Clausewitz,
and of course Hegel, the father of dialectics,
into this category. It is hard to find dialec-
tical thinkers who have a taboo on violence,
as struggle is so important to them. To those
who think that the dynamics of the world
consists of winning struggles, a taboo on
violence may seem very confining. How-
ever, I have put Herman Schmid, the Swed-
ish Communist peace researcher in this cate-
gory, with the understanding that the taboo
may not be absolute.
Evolutionary theorists look upon the
world essentially as a disequilibrium system
consisting of the ecological interaction of
innumerable species, interacting under condi-
tions of constant change of parameters (mu-
tation). The dominant mode of relationship
is interaction not ’struggle,’ in spite of Dar-
win’s unfortunate and quite inaccurate met-
aphor about the ’struggle for existence’.
Strictly dialeotical processes are regarded as

very rare in hiological evolution and of only
occasional significance in social evolution,
the major dynamics of which is regarded as
nondialectical and ecological. In this view
the structures that emerge out of the evolu-
tionary process are simply cross sections of
that process at ~a point or in a period of time,
although in their turn, of course, these
structures may help to determine subse-
quent developments. I place myself, of
course, very firmly in this category, with a
taboo on violence. Evolutionary thinkers
with no taboo on violence go back, I would
argue, certainly to Adam Smith, Alfred
Marshall, and Charles Darwin. I have put
Garrett Hardin of the ’tragedy of the com-
mons’ as an ,outstanding modern represen-
tative.
Looking at Galtung as I do from some-
what the opposite end of the structural-evo-
lutionary continuum, I have a number of
small dialectical quarrels to pick with him.
I should explain that I regard these mainly
as structural dialectics rather than as evo-
lutionary dialectics, structural dialectics be-
ing situations where contradictions are not
resolved but represent in themselves and in
their continuing tensions a more adequate
representation of reality than any resolu-
tion or synthesis could be. The yin and yang
of ancient Chinese thought is a good ex-
ample. On the other hand, some of these
disagreements may be of the evolutionary-
dialectical type, in which one party is right
and the other party is wrong, and which
may be resolved, therefore, in evolutionary
terms by some kind of ’victory’ of one over
the other.
My first quarrel then is that Galtung’s
thought is struotural-static rather than evo-
lutionary or even dialectical, though I .have
some hesitation ~in putting him in this box
because he is not really an equilibrium
theorist. I am sure he would agree with me
that equilibrium is a useful figment of the
human imagination and is unknown in the
real world, which is subject to constant
change. In C~altung’~s thought, however, one
suspects that change is always related to
77
some kind of normative evaluation. There
are some things about the world that he
thinks are bad and he wants them to be bet-
ter. This is fine, but most change is not a
result of normative evaluations.
This leads me to my second quarrel, which
is more a matter of emphasis than of dialec-
tical alternates. Galtung’s thought is very
heavily normative, to the point perhaps
where ’the description of realty suffers. I
must tread lightly at the point for my own
thought is also very normative. I regard
peace research, for instance, as essentially a
subdiscipline within what I would like to
call ’normative science’, which consists of
the serious study of what we mean by saying
that the state of the world goes from bad to
better or from bad to worse, and of the im-
pact of these perceptions on the actual dy-
namics of the world as it spreads into the
future. I regard normative science, however,
as a dangerous occupation, even though I
believe it irs necessary. There is always a
danger that our norms act as a filter which
leads to a perversion of our image of reality.
We all tend to see the world somewhat as
we want to see it and all thinking is in some
degree wishful, but in the values of the scien-
tific community strong emphasis is placed
on defenses against this type of distortion
of perception. Much of the paraphemelia of
science, whether of experiments, sampling,
or statistical testing, can be though of as a
kind of ritual designed to protect the scien-
tist against wishful thinking and perception.
Another defense is that norms should be
separated from affect as far as possible.
Values can be held clearly without strong
feelings and emotions, and one suspects that
it is feelings and emotions that distort per-
ceptions of reality rather than the values
themselves. If this seems to make the scien-
tist into a rather .cold fish, perhaps we have
to face the fact that the scientist should be
a rather cold fish and that emotions and af-
feats should ’be reserved for those who do
not hold the scientific ethic and who are
prepared to employ the arts of persuasion
and deceit in the interest of their beliefs.
78
This is a real dilemma and it can lead into
serious role conflict between the warm and
complete human being burning with anger
at oppression, poverty, violence, and insults
to human dignity, and the cool scientist
seeking to perceive the itruth of !the overall
patterns of dynamics which lead to a reduc-
tion of these evils. Galtung hovers between
the two roles ,and this is not ’to his discredit.
But the tension may not always be resolved
in a way which avoids distortion of percep-
tion.
While I am on methodological issues I
might mention two other methodological
quarrels. One is that Galtung’s thought strikes
me as too taxonomic in ~a world that is es-
sentially continuous and in which taxonomy
is usually a convenience of the human mind
rather than ;a description of reality. His
penchant for matrices and for putting things
in their pigeanhales, as I did in Figure 1, is
an example of this tendency. He constantly
thinks, however, in terms of dichotomies -
Structural versus behavioral violence, top
dogs versus under dogs, center versus periph-
ery, and so on, in a world which is much more
complex in its speciation and more con-
tinuous than any dichotomy can accomplish.
On the other hand - and this may sound
inconsistent with the foregoing -
the struc-
tural nature of his thought prevents him
sometimes from perceiving the real discon-
tinuities and the patterns of the world. He
tends to underestimate the large elements of
randomness in social systems and the extra-
ordinary difficultly which is introdwced into
the perception of social systems by frequent
but unpredictable parametric change, that is,
by what might be called ’system breaks’, in
which a previous set of regularities is re-
placed by a new set. There is no necessary
reason why structural thinking should lead
to a neglect of randomness, as we can easily
throw random elements into structures, but
in evolutionary thinking randomness is a
very essential element. The belief ,that his-
tory had to happen the way it did is just an
illusion of historians. The record is that of
a succession of improbable events that some-
how came off. Social systems are full of
things like ’hundred-year floods’, events the
probability of which is roughly known but
where the incidence in tie cannot he
known. It is the incidence of these proba-
bilisti~c events in time which create the ac-
tual temporal pattern of history. I would
certainly not call Galtung a strict determi-
nist, but there does seem to be a certain un-
derlying tendency for a structuralist to think
in rather deterministic terms.
Another quarrel, partly one of semantics
but also going a little deeper than that, is
that Galtung seems to me to have a certain
carelessness in the definition of positive and
negative terms. The expression ’negative
peace’ of which he is very fond seems to me
a complete misnomer. What he is talking
about lis negative war. I am not sure indeed
that the terms positive and negative are very
useful here. What we perceive in the inter-
national system Is a phase system with two
fairly well defined phases of war and peace,
which constantly succeed each other, just as
water freezes into ice and ice remelts into
water as the temperature falls and rises
again. Peace is a phase of a system of war-
ring groups. It is not just ’not-war’ any more
than water is ’not ice’. Bo.th peace and war
are complex phases of the system, each with
its own characteristics.
The term ’positive peace’, by which Galt-
ung seems to mean any state of affairs which
gets high marks on his scale of goodness, is
also most unfortunate. It is not in any sense
the opposite of negative peace. In fact it
may have very little to do with peace. Peace
in the phase sense is almost certainly a part
of i~t, though even this would not be true in
everybody’s estimation. There are people
who have loved war and thought it was bet-
ter than peace, and while this is not part of
my own values as a normative scientist, I
have to admit that it has been part of some
people’s values in the past and may even
continue to be so. It is much more impor-
tant to clarify the distination between the
negative and the positive in the social sci-
ences than it is in physics, where the prin-

ciples of simple algebra hold and minus
minus is always plus. In social systems minus
minus is not the same as plus. Refraining
from a bad, that is, from doing
producing
harm, is
very different
a thing from produc-
ing a good, and threats, a proposed ex-
change of is
negative goods, extraordinarily
different from the exchange of positive
goods.
It is this confusion between the negative
and the positive which perhaps leads Gall-
ung into what seems to me to be a profound
misunderstanding of the entropy concept, as
expounded particularly in the second essay
of Volume I, which is an important clue to
his whole value system. In thermodynamics
the entropy concept was defined negatively,
perhaps unfortunately, though it did not do
as much harm as the phlogiston concept in
chemistry, which turned out to be negative
oxygen. Entropy is essentially negative po-
tential. The second law of thermodynamics
can be generalized by saying that i~f any-
thing happens it is because there is a poten-
tidal for its happening, but after it has hap-
pened that potential has been used up. A
decrease in potential through its realization,
therefore, is the same thing as the increase
of entropy. Potential, however, because it
is a positive concept, is much easier to grasp
than the concept of entropy.
Because of his passion for equality, his
hatred of hierarchy, dominance, top dogs,
and anything which looks like oppression
(much of which is praiseworthy), Galtung
identifies entropy as a symbol of goodness
and regards negentropy, that is, structure,
improbability, and potential, as evil. Galt-
ung is all for the increase of ’Social entropy
so far as that means destruction of organi-
zation and hierarchy, the dissipation of
wealth, and ,the reduction of everything to
a dead level. It would almost seem as if
Galtung would regard the last ultimate
whimper of the universe, according to the
second law of thermodynamics, in which all
things are at an equal temperature and
equally distribute throughout space so that
nothing more can conceivable happen,
79
the ultimate heaven, or perhaps one should
say Nirvana, towards which all this uncom-
fortable and unequal structure of stars and
planets, life and society, will eventually
move.
Here we see the profound difference be-
tween the structural and the evolutionary
points of view. The structural point of view
turns out to be inimical to the ideal off struc-
ture itself, and sees structure as the enemy
of quality -
which it is. The evolutionary
point of view sees the whole evolutionary
process as the segregation of entropy, the
building up of little castles of order in the
crystal, in DNA, in life, in humans, and in
their innumerable artifacts both personal,
material and organizational, always at the
cost, according to the second law, of increas-
ing thermodynamic disorder elsewhere, in
our case of course nicely segregated in the
sun about which we don’t have to worry.
The struoturalist sees pollution in the struc-
ture whether it is smoke, slums or vice and
says ’away with it’. The evolutionist sees
pollution as part of the price of evolution
itself.
Cra~ltung’s misunderstandings about entro-
py derive, one suspects, from the cardinal
principle of his normative system, the over-
whelmingly strong value which he gives iso
equality as such. One almost suspects that
Galtung would prefer a society in which
everybody were equally destitute rather than
one in which some were ~desbi~tute and some
were rich. A passion for equality as such,
however, roan easily lead into the hatred of
the rich without any love for the poor. One
can put a very strong negative value on
poverty and believe it should be abolished
without believing in equality at all. This
would lead to a society with a floor below
which nobody were allowed to fall, but
above which a high degree of inequality
would be tolerable. Galtung nowhere spells
out what his Ideal society would ~be, and in-
deed if any of us did this we would probably
decide that we did not like it after all! But
the drive for equality as such is extremely
as strong in all his writings.
80
This does mean that he tends to under-
estimate the costs ~of equality, which to my
mind at least, can be very high, first in terms
of a lack of quality, second in therms of a
lack of liberty. Quality is a peak achieve-
ment, not average achievement, and an
egalitarian society would have to forego the
peaks. A thoroughly egalitarian society could
never have produced the peaks of art or
literature or science. It is a curious paradox
here that Galtung himself Is a distinctly
high-quality person and violates his own
canons of equality,. He is of the mountains,
not the plains. His real income is far above
the world average. He travels extensively
around the world. Like myself he belongs to
the intellectual jet set, and, while I would
have no difficulty in justifying this in terms
of his productivity, it is ironic that an egali-
tarian society could never conceivable have
produced Galtung, himself.
Furthermore, Galtung never really faces
the possibility that equality involves a loss
of liberty. There are several passages in his
work which suggest tat unlike the more ex-
treme egalitarian, he does put a high value
on liberty. Liberty, however, involves prop-
erty, for property is that within which we
have liberty., and property always involves
a dynamic which destroys equality, for some
people use it well and some ill, some accu-
mulate and some decumulate. The famous
’Matthew principle’ from the Gospel of
Matthew - to him that hath shall be given
-
ensures that once an equality of property
is destroyed, even by random forces, then
if there is liberty it is easier for those with
more, and harder for those with less, to get
more, until some kind of equilibrium of in-
equality is achieved. While there is a strong
case for restrictive definitions of private
property and for the establishment of many
kinds of social property in the interests of
greater equality, a throughgoing egalitarian-
ism inevitably implies restrictions on indi-
vidual liberty which are unacceptable to me
and which I suspect would really be unac-
cepta~ble to Galtung.
Closely related to Galtung’s horror of in-
equality is his horror of dominance, and
therefore of hierarchy,. He cannot stand any-
body’s being top dog in spite of the fact
that he is z distinctly top dog himself be-
cause of his high quality. This leads ,to an
almost total rejection of hierarchy as a
principle of social organization. Yet one
suspects he has never really examined the
price of this rejection. Hierarchy is the price
that we pay for :any organization beyond the
small group in which everybody can com-
municate with everyone else. It is a device
for economizing communication which is ab-
solutely necessary in organizations beyond a
handful of people. Even with a hundred
people, there are 9,900 possible pairs, and
communication between all ,the pairs is im-
possible.
Hierarchy, of course, has its costs in terms
of ’corruption of information and in terms
of concentration of power, and it is a fairly
general proposition that the more powerful
a decision-maker, the more likely are the
decisions to be bad ones. That there are in-
efficiencies and pathologies of hierarchy no-
body can doubt. These must be dealt with,
however, within .the structure of hierarchy
itself and cannot be dealt with by abolishing
it. To try to solve human problems iby dis-
membering hierarchy and creating the social
entropy of disorganization seems to me
wholly illusory. Galtung’s recognition of the
pathologies of hierarchy is probably what
saves him ’ÍI1Om Marxism (as he has repeated-
ly stated, he is not a Marxist), for Marx
completely failed to come to grips with the
problems of hierarchy, and for this reason
I think has almost Certainly done more harm
than good. It is one of the great ironies of
history that the socialist movement, based
on ~a very legitimate demand for greater
equality and participation, has resulted in
enormous concentraltions of power and ex-
tremely pathological hierarchies. To deny all
validity to dominance is to me to deny
a human problem of very high priority,
which is the development of non-pathologi-
cal forms of dominance which are legiti-
mated and part of a legitimate social con-

tract. The social contract after all is a dom-
inance to which the dominated agree because
it is worth the price. Galtung’s hatred of
dominance prevents him from ever formu-
lating this problem.
Closely related to his hatred of dominance
is the view that poverty and inequality are
mainly the result of oppression, that is, the
dominance of the dominant, and the way to
get rid of Œt is to remove the dominant from
their positions. While no one can deny that
dominance and oppression are real problems
in the world, it seems to me a gross misun-
derstanding to attribute the mass of human
misery to them. Our differences here illu-
strate very well I think the difference be-
tween the structural and the evolutionary
approach. The structuralist looks at the
world and sees that some people are rich
and some people are poor because of the
structures of property and power, and ar-
gues that if only the rich were poorer and
less powerful the poor would be richer and
more powerful. The view is attractive in its
simplicity. Unfortunately, it is probably an
illusion. The rich are not rich and powerful
because the poor are poor and impo’tent, but
because the rich and the poor have parted-
pated in different dynamic processes which
are not closely related.
This is the principle of ’differential devel-
opment.’ In the extreme model we might
postulate two islands totally unconnected,
and starting off at an equal level, one of
which got rich because its vulture encour-
aged innovation and thrift and the other
stayed poor because its culture did not culti-
vate the behavior which would lead to riches.
Here there is no exploitation, no oppression
because there is no ,contact, but the differen-
tial dynamics of the system produces in-
equality. At the other extreme we have the
Marxist model in which the poor, or at least
the working class, produce everything and
the rich take it all away from them except the
barest subsistence. The real world is a mix-
ture of both thee models. It its ~a paradox
that the Marxist model is much more appli-
cable to pre-capitalist societies; it breaks
81
down as we move into capitalism, especially
as we move into developed capitalism,
simply because the differential development
model really takes over.
Each of the three theoretical frameworks
produces its own dynamic. Structural think-
ing leads into mechanical dynamics like
celestial mechanics and econometrics; dia-
leatical thinking into dynamic of winning
struggles; evolutionary thinking into a dy-
nami,cs in which genetic information or
know-how is ithe primary field within which
change takes place, mediated through the
selective processes of ecological interaction.
The real world is a mixture of all three and
the great problem is to identify the mix. My
own view is ithat the evolutionary processes
dominate the other Two. To my mind, there-
fore, a ’liberationism’ which operates pri-
marily in ’the dialectical mode and looks to
the solution of human problems by getting
rid of top dogs simply produces another set
of top dogs, often worse than the last, and
does very little to promote the real evolu-
tionary and developmental processes which
are the only way of getting rid of poverty
and diminishing the sum of human misery.
On this point it seems to me Galtung fails to
transcend the dialectical viewpoint, with
which he is ’clearly profoundly uncomfort-
able, because he does not perceive the im-
portance of the evolutionary process.
Closely related to ’the above is the cover-
emphasis on redistribution rather than pro-
duction. This also rises out of structural
thinking. Structuralists are particularly fond
of the metaphor of the ’pie’, which is the
total product, which is then divided among
the claimants. In the real world there is no
pie, but a vast proliferation of little tarts,
some growing faster than others. Neither of
the metaphors is really adequate. In the case
of the public sector there is a ’pie’ and re-
distributions are possible, but this is limited,
and redistributions which destroy produc-
tivnty can easily make the poor worse off
than they were before. An emphasis on pro-
duction, however, is an emphasis on evolu-
tion. The great Marxist fallacy is that the
82
product comes from labor; in fact it comes
from the social genetic structure of society
-
the knowledge, the know-how, and the
organizations which facilitate the ability of
this know-how to direct energy Into the
transportation and transformation of mate-
rials into the forms of phenotypes or pro-
ducts. The overall productivity of a society
is much more a function of its knowledge
and know-how structure, (including organi-
zational know-how, than iit its of natural re-
sources or even of the labor force. Economic
development, like evolution, of which it is
an example, its a process essentially in ge-
netic structures. In the social case, of course,
this is human knowledge and know-how.
Capital is merely human knowledge imposed
on the material world. Thus, the poverty of
the poor historically has been relieved very
little by redistribution. The poor have gotten
richer mainly by getting into the evolu-
tionary mainstream of Increasing know-how
and so increasing their own productivity.
Somewhat related to these misperceptions
about production is the center-periphery
model of Galtung, which is very dominant
in his work and closely related to his desire
for equality and his hatred of dominance.
The model is not wholly inapplicable, al-
though it obscure the complexity of the net-
work of production and trade, and it be-
comes completely misleading when it as-
sumes that raw material production belongs
only to the periphery and that processing
and manufacturing will always occupy the
center. This is closely related to the ’de-
pendencia’ type of argument that is partic-
ularly popular in Latin America, which ar-
gues that the poor are poor because they
have poor terms of trade with the rich on
account of the political power or dominance
of the rich. This, again, goes back to a s’truc-
turalist view of the world and there is not
really very much evidence to support it. Oc-
casionally good terms of trade, in the case
of Japanese silk in the latter part .of the
nineteenth century or Swedish timber in the
same period, have contributed ,to the more
rapid development of a society. On the
whole, however, terms of trade for any one
party tend to rise and fall with the shifting
cargo of world industry. It cannot be relied
on for any evolutionary process that leads
out of poverty.
Increased productivity is really the only
method by which a society can go on getting
richer for a considerable period of time. The
’differential development’ theses tat inter-
nal culitures are far more important in de-
termining the movement of a society away
from poverty towards riches than any ex-
ternal relationship, including ’terms of trade,
is supported by the fact tat some societies
which previously were mainly raw materials
suppliers did quite well out of this and got
rich, while others similarly placed have
stayed poor. Australia, New Zealand, Ca-
nada, the Unite States, and Sweden are ex-
amples of the former; Argentina, Uruguay
and Chile are examples of the latter. The
whole center-periphery argument disinte-
grates in the light of evolutionary dynamics.
Peripheries become centers, centers become
peripheries, and there is very little evidence
that centers have any permanent power or
even much redistributive power of any kind.
The empires were a drain on the imperial
counties and hindered their development.
So far in this discussion we have barely
mentioned the word peace, which is a re-
election of the fact perhaps that Galtung’s
thought is a very large-scale -system of which
his work on peace and conflict is only a
part, although a very important part, and
the part perhaps which motivated the whole.
He has, however, made one important con-
tribution to the general theory of conflict.
This is the distinction which he makes be-
tween associative solutions bo conflict situa-
tions and dissociative solutions. Associative
solutions involve some kind of agreement,
some merging of identity of the conflicting
parties, perhaps some superordinate struc-
ture or organization so that the conflict is
merged, as it were, in the larger general will.
Dissociative solutions are those which in-
volve property boundaries, good fences
or
making good neighbors, keeping people

away from each other, and so on. Galtung
does not rejeot the dissociative solutions in
principle, but he clearly has a very strong
prejudice in favor of the associative solu-
tions. This is perhaps z little inconsistent
with some of his other positions, as associa-
tive solutions to conflict tend to :involve
hierarchy, dominance, inequality, and a great
many other things which he does not like.
The contradiction here though real is
meaningful. One suspects that it comes out
of the basic biblical background in Galt-
ung’s Norwegian heritage, even though he
is a professed agnostic. The idea of a world
in which everybody is equal and everybody
loves everybody is a vision of biblical reli-
gion which for all its difficulties of attain-
ment has had a profound effect on the
dreams of the human future. But in Galt-
ung’s case it does raise obstacles to perceiv-
ing the problem of the optimum mixture of
the associative and dissociative elements in
conflict resolution and indeed in the larg-
er framework of human betterment. This,
again, carries us back to the role of property,
which I think Galtung has never adequately
analyzed. Property is created by a social
contract, that is, by an associative act or
structure. It works, however, by creating dis-
sociative solutions to problems of conflict in
the form of agreed fences and boundaries.
By so doing it takes the burden off the
further implementation of associative solu-
tions. Property, whether in land, capital or
national boundaries, is perhaps the easiest
thing to agree about and once we have
agreed about it we don’t have to agree about
much else, for we each have liberty within
the boundaries of our property. As agree-
ment is a fantastically scarce commodity
with a very high potential cost, economizing
it seems like a good thing. I would, there-
fore, give a much higher ethical value to the
dissociative solutions ;than Galtung, does, al-
though the problem of ,the right mix is a
very difficult one which we are a long way
from having solved.
Finally, we come tao the great Galtung
metaphors of ’structural violence’ and ’posi-
83
tive peace’. They are metaphors rather than
models, and for that very reason are suspect.
Metaphors always imply models and meta-
phors have much more persuasive power
than models do, for models tend to be the
preserve of the specialist. But when a meta-
phor implies a bad model it can be very
dangerous, for it is bath persuasive and
wrong. The metaphor of structural violence
I would argue falls right into this category.
The metaphor is that poverty, deprivation,
ill health, low expectations of life, a condi-
tion in which more than half the human race
lives, is ’like’ a thug beating up the victim
and taking his money away from him in the
street, -or it is ’like’ a conqueror stealing the
land of the people and reducing them to
slavery. The implication is that poverty and
its associated ills are the fault of the thug
or the conqueror and the solution is to do
away with thugs and conquerors. While there
is some truth in the metaphor, in the modem
world at least there is not very much. Vio-
lence, whether of the streets and the home,
or of the guerilla, of the police, or of the
armed forces, is a very different phenome-
non from poverty. The processes which create
and sustain poverty are not at all like the
processes which create and sustain violence,
although like everything else in the world,
everything is somewhat related to every-
thing else.
There is a very real problem of the struc-
tures which lead to violence, but unfortu-
nately Galitung’s metaphor of structural vio-
lence as he has used it has diverted atten-
tion from this problem. Violence in the be-
havioral sense, that is, somebody actually
doing damage to somebody else and trying
to make them worse off, is a ’threshold’
phenomenon, rather like the boiling over of
a pot. The temperature under a pot can rise
for a long time without its boiling over, but
at some threshold boiling over will take
place. The study of the structures which un-
derlie violence are a very important and
much neglected part of peace research and
indeed of social science in general. Thresh-
old phenomena like violence are difficult to
84
study because they represent ’breaks’ in the
system rather than uniformities. Violence,
whether between persons or organizations,
occurs when the ’strain’ on a system is too
great for its ‘~s~trength’. The metaphor here
is that violence is like what happens when
we break a piece of chalk. Strength and
strain, however, especially in social systems,
are so interwoven historically that it is very
difficulty to separate them.
The diminution of violence involves two
possible strategies, or a mixture of the two;
one is the increase in the strength of the sys-
tem, ~the other is the diminution of the strain.
The strength of systems involves habit, curl-
ture, taboos, and sanctions, all these things,
which enable a system to stand Increasing
strain without breaking down into violence.
The strains on the system are largely dy-
namic in character, such as arms races, mu-
tually stimulated hostility, changes in rela-
tive economic position or political power,
which are often hard to identify. Conflict of
interest are only part of the strain on a sys-
tem, and not always the most important part.
It is very hard for people ito know their in-
terests, and misperceptions of interests take
place mainly through the dynamic processes,
not through the structural ones. It is only
perceptions of interest which affect people’s
behavior, not the ’real’ interests, whatever
these may be, and the gap between percep-
tion and reality can be very large and re-
sistant to change.
However, what Galitung calls structural
violence (which has been defined by one un-
kind commentator as anything that Galltung
doesn’~t like) was originally defined as any
unnecessarily low expectation of life, an that
assumption that anybody who dies before
the allotted span has been killed, however
unintentionally and unknowingly, by some-
body else. The ooncept has been expanded
to include all the problems off poverty, desti-
tution, deprivation, and misery. These are
enormously real and are a very high priority
for research and action, but they belong to
systems which are only peripherally related
to the structures which, produce violence.
Thins is not ito say <that the cultures of vio-
lence and she cultures of poverty are not
sometimes related, though not all poverty
cultures are culture of violence, and cer-
tainly not all cultures of violence are pover-
ty cultures. But the dynamics of poverty and
the success or failure to rise out off ’it are of
a complexity far beyond anything which the
metaphor of structural violence can offer.
While the metaphor of struotural violence
performed a ’service in calling attention to
a problem, it may have done a disservice in
preventing us from finding the answer.
With all the richness and imaginative
originality of these essays one feels that
something fundamental is missing. This is
something which Malthus perceived as early
as 1798, which Lexis Richardson perceived
in hies theory of arms races, which Anatol
Rapoport perceived in his study of the pris-
oner’s dilemma, and which Garrett Hardin
perceived yin the tragedy of the commons -
that there are in society perverse dynamic
processes by which social systems go from
bad to worse rather than from bad to better,
in spite of the great principle of decision
that everybody does what he thinks as best
at the time. The analysis of these processes of
perverse dynamics is the key to successful
intervention in human betterment. And ,yin-
tervention there must be. Things left merely
to themselves follow the law of entropy,
that is, the law of the exhaustion of poten-
tial, whether of thermodynamic potential in
equalizing temperature, of biological po-
tential in aging, or of social potential in the
corruption and decline of societies and or-
ganizations. The generalized second law
says all things go naturally from bad to
worse unless there is re-creation of poten-
tial. The understanding of how things go
from bad to worse and how intervention
can reverse thins involves models, not just
metaphors. This is the great business of what
I would call ’normative science’, and I share
with Galtung the feeling that this is one of
the most urgent tasks of the human race.
The relation of normative science to peace
research is an important question, partly se-

mantic, but it has some substance. What
Galtung has tried to do with the concepts of
struotural violence and positive peace has
been to expand the concept of peace research
into a general normative science. In prin-
ciple this seems to me a very important con-
tribution and it could well be that one of
the most important fruits of the peace re-
search movement would be precisely to have
it expand into a general movement for
normative science, which would concern it-
self not merely with peace and war, or even
with violence, but with all the ills that
afflict the human race, and would involve
an orderly way of thinking about these
things in the hope of more successful nor-
mative intervention. So much harm is done
with the motivation of doing good that
it is clear that a good normative science is
a very high priority. Within this, the study
of peace and war in the international sys-
tem, and of the larger problem of personal
and group violence, form important subsets.
Other subsets >would include medicine, crim-
inology, psychiatry, family studies, religious
studies, poverty studies, and so on, which
would cover between them the whole field
of the social systems and indeed beyond this
into the biological and physical systems
which so profoundly affect the fate of the
human race.
Ultimately, normative science would have
to include the study off the earth, or any
other human habitation, as ~a total system
from the point of view of human interven-
tion for human betterment. Normative sci-
ence does not have to produce a universal
agreement as to the definition of human
betterment. The study of various images of
it will be part of its field. Galtung’s mistake
it seems to me was to take the concept and
theoretical structures which were appropri-
ate to part of normative science, namely
peace research, ,and try and apply these to
the whole, which cannot really be done.
This is an error, however, which can easily
be corrected and it should not be allowed to
detract from his major achievement, the
magnitude of which perhaps he did not even
85
realize himself, of seeing that a normative
science was a serious human endeavor.
A further principle which the Galtung ex-
perience suggests is the extraordinary diffi-
culty of being really interdisciplinary. Part
of the failures of the Gal~tung system arise
one suspects from the fact that he is pri-
marily a sociologist and that he really does
not understand the contribution of econom-
ics. As a good many economists do not seem
to understand it either, this perhaps can be
forgiven! As an intellectual Galtung dislikes
business and the commonplaceness of the
marketplace, and the ’apparently vulgar and
dissociative character of commercial life.
This leads him to underestimate the moral
value of exchange as lea social organizer, im-
plying as it does equality of status, even as
it may lead to inequality in wealth. Galt-
ung’s deep ambivalence towards socialism
reflects perhaps an inability to choose be-
tween what is perceived as the tyranny of
the market and the tyranny of the state. If
we reject exchange and the property institu-
tion on which it rests we are all too likely to
get not love but threat as a major organizing
factor of society, as the history of the com-
munist states abundantly demonstrate. Here
again, we come back to the need for a mix
of the associative and dissociative elements
in social life if we are really to move from
bad to better instead of from bad to worse.
It seems almost indecent to write an ex-
tended review of so important a work with-
out footnotes, but I have deliberately tried
to paint a broad canvas. There are enough
inconsistencies in every creative mind so
that it is easy to misinterpret iit in detail. I
am sure in some point or other I have mis-
interpreted what Galtung has to say and I
would be most happy to be corrected.
Furthermore, I have left out ~a large number
of important details -
the discussion of dis-
armament, for instance, the delightful pro-
posals for turning the Cathodic Church into
a gigantic Society of Friends, the empirical
studies of public opinion and of the sub-
culture of the United Nations’ forces, and
the innumerable flashes of insight that oc-
86
cur in every chapters. We must wait until all
the volumes are published before a final
evaluation can be made and even then there
will probably be as many evaluations as
there are readers. If this review can per-
suade its readers to study the volumes them-
selves, it will have accomplished a major
purpose. It will only really be useful, how-
ever, if it can stimulate an ongoing dialogue.