Rethinking Peace in a World Without Rigid Categories

Peace, for many traditions, has been imagined as a final state. It is often described as a "natural" resting place for societies once violence, injustice, or oppression are overcome. Yet, if we begin from a humble free thinker's perspective of the world, which is impermanent, constructed, and often absurd, peace cannot be a final, essential state. It must be seen instead as a fragile, strategic, and continually reconstructed process.

Johan Galtung, one of the great founders of peace studies, offered a famous typology: Negative Peace (the absence of violence) and Positive Peace (the presence of just and equitable structures). Later expansions included ideas like Cultural Peace, Structural Peace, Direct Peace, and Ecological Peace. Each concept, while illuminating, still often carried the shadow of an essentialist dream: that peace could be stabilized, named, and known once and for all.

From more a critical lens, however, we must reinterpret these types of peace not as categories of permanent achievement but as strategic, fragile practices — constantly evolving, inevitably imperfect, and endlessly dialectical.

Let us rewalk Galtung’s typology through this lens:

1. Negative Peace: Traditionally, negative peace is defined simply as the absence of direct violence.
My understanding of negative peace is not a "true absence" — because tensions, exclusions, and suppressions continue invisibly even when open violence stops.
Thus, negative peace should be understood as a temporary silencing of manifest conflict, often sustained by fragile agreements, shared exhaustion, or precarious balances of fear.
It is a strategic ceasefire in the ongoing absurd dance of competing meanings and interests.
Negative peace is valuable, but always provisional: it should be seen as a breathing space, not an endpoint.

2. Positive peace: It is defined by Galtung as the presence of just social systems. To me, it resonates more with non-exclusive common good.
Yet, it must be reminded that no system of justice is ever "complete."
Every structure of peace inevitably creates new exclusions, new blind spots, and new tensions.
Positive peace, therefore, must be understood as an ongoing negotiation — a strategic, patient struggle to expand dignity, participation, and fairness across a field of inevitable imperfection. In this view, building positive peace is less like constructing a cathedral and more like tending a vast, unruly garden. It is always pruning, adjusting, resisting decay, and accepting partial failures without giving up the overall task.

3. Structural Peace: Galtung spoke of structural violence — the harm caused not by individuals, but by unjust systems.
Structural peace, therefore, aims at dismantling these injustices.
From constructivist realist perspective, structural peace is the endless work of unveiling hidden hierarchies, challenging rooted systems of oppression, and offering alternative structures that better approximate inclusion and dignity.
Yet because structures are dynamic, constantly recreated by discourse, culture, economics, and history, structural peace can never be "achieved" once and for all. It is a lifelong and generation-spanning dialectic: to unmask, resist, and rebuild.

4. Cultural Peace: It refers to a set of norms, symbols, and values that legitimize nonviolence and empathy.
But if cultures themselves are shifting, strategic constructions, then cultural peace is not a "thing" we install into society; it is an ongoing battle for narratives.
Thus, cultural peace may be understood as the strategic curation of meanings that protect human agency, diversity, and mutual respect even as dominant cultures try to simplify, essentialize, or weaponize identities for exclusionary purposes. Cultural peace is a contest over which myths of prevail. It requires constant storytelling, reimagining, and resisting reductive narratives.

5. Ecological Peace seeks a harmonious relationship between humans and their environment.
However, imagining "nature" as a pure, harmonious essence to which we must "return."
Nature itself is dynamic, sometimes violent, indifferent to human hopes.
Thus, ecological peace becomes the strategic cultivation of resilience — crafting human ways of life that respect impermanence, embrace ecological limits, and steward what can be stewarded, even knowing that perfect harmony is impossible.
It is a peace of stewardship, not mastery; a peace of humility before absurd but beautiful realities.

In this vision, peace is not a prize we win.

It is a practice, a discipline, a way of living inside the impermanent, may be tragic, yet constructed nature of human and social life.
It demands humility without nihilism; resilience without self-deception; creativity without utopianism.
Peace is not the absence of conflict or the achievement of final justice.
It is the art of sustaining moral and political friendship across irreducible differences.
It is the strategic defense of the fragile spaces where the non-exclusive common good might survive a little longer.
It is an act of profound confidence — not in any fixed metaphysical order — but in the possibility of continually choosing construction over destruction, dialogue over domination, solidarity over isolation, even when everything around us pushing otherwise.