Johan Galtung Quotes

Peace is something you make with your adversaries, not with your friends.

The killed are dead, the bereaved are traumatized. The trauma may be converted to hatred that may be converted into revenge addiction.

The main focus of the TRANSCEND method3 is not to merely identify who is guilty and punish those, the traditional legal approach, but to create an attractive new reality acceptable to all those involved.

that the time is always ripe, that the place is here and the time is now.

Gandhian economic boycott, however, combined refusal to buy English textiles with the collection of funds for the merchants precisely not to confuse the key issue by threatening their livelihood.

One example of systematic oppression is structural violence. This concept was introduced in the 1970s by Johan Galtung, a pioneering Norwegian researcher in peace and conflict, and founder of the International Peace Research Institute. He describes structural violence as “a form of violence which corresponds with the systematic ways in which a given social structure or social institution kills people slowly by preventing them from meeting their basic needs. Institutionalized elitism, ethnocentricism, classism, racism, sexism, adultism, nationalism, heterosexism and ageism are just some examples of structural violence. Life spans are reduced when people are socially dominated, politically oppressed, or economically exploited. Structural violence and direct violence are highly interdependent. Structural violence inevitably produces conflict and often direct violence including family violence, racial violence, hate crimes, terrorism, genocide, and war.

Additionally, whether or not we are a part of a legally protected class has massive implications for how safe and secure we feel in the world. The sociologist Johan Galtung refers to this as structural violence.33 Distinguished from physical violence (yet often intertwined), structural violence refers to a type of violence that is often invisible yet intricately built into social structures.