Twelve Friendly Quarrels with Johan Galtung Author(s): Kenneth E.

Boulding Reviewed work(s): Source: Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 14, No. 1 (1977), pp. 75-86 Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/423312 . Accessed: 13/02/2012 19:22
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Journal of Peace Research No. 1, Vol. XIV/1977

Twelve Friendly Quarrelswith lohan 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. and472 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 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 category. These two suibstantial volumes of reprinted papers are only the first of five and perhaps more. They are the product of a man of enormous vitality and imagination, whose work, though centered firmly in sociology, 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 Boulding, the Journal of Peace Research publishes the first of what we hope will become a semi-regular feature: major 'review essays' of particularly important books or series of books. While we do not feel that we have the space for regular book reviews, 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.

ence in English (not his native language), but apart from occasional lapses into sociological 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 picture. Some repetitiveness, of course, is inevitable in a collection of this kind, but, as much of what Galtung has 'to say is worth saying more than once, a certain redundancy does not detract from the value of the volumes. It is virtually impossible to review in detail a collection as rich and diverse as the thirty-three papers contained in these two volumes. The essays are classified roughly by topic, 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.

Kenneth E. Boulding

Structural Tabooon Violence No Tabooon Violence Johan Galtung Talcott Ps Parsons

Dialectical Herman Schmid Marx, Ln, Lenin, Mao

Evolutionary Kenneth Boulding Garrett Hardin

theoretical; one on public opinion and disarmament, which is mainly sociologicalempirical; a section on peacekeeping, peacemaking and peacebuilding, which is mainly reports; and a section on nonmilitary defense, which 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 profited from his friendship. Nevertheless, I do find myself in quite sharp disagreement with many of his positions, and perhaps the most useful thing I can do in this review is to explain these disagreements, even at the cost of sounding a little cantankerous and personal. 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 lof theoretical approach to the world, which I have called the 'structural', the 'dialectical' (and the 'evolutionary'. Then I have classified each 'of these as to whether a taboo of some sort on violence was important in the thought of the writer. Strudtural theorists think mainly in terms of static patterns and formls.Even when they try to be dynamic they end up with fourdimensional 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 even Lewis 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 thought is Parsonian. But Max Weber, Walras, Vilfredo Pareto, and many other highly respectable social scientists can be put, with a little pushing and stretching, into this pigeonhole. 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 dialectical 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. However, I have put Herman Schmid, the Swedish Communistpeace researcher in this category, 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 conditions of constant Ichangeof parameters (mutation). The dominant mode of relationship is interaction not 'struggle,' in spite of Darwin's unfortunate and quite inaccurate metaphor about the 'struggle for existence'. Strictly dialectical processes are regarded as

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very rare in biological 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 evolutionary 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 subsequent 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 commons' as an outstanding modern representative. Looking at Galtung as I do from somewhat the opposite end of the structural-evolutionary 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 evolutionary dialectics, structural dialectics being situations where contradictions are not resolved but represent in themselves and in their continuing tensions a more adequate representation of reality than any resolution or synthesis could be. The yin and yang of ancient Chinese thought is a good example. On the other hand, some of these disagreements may be of the evolutionarydialectical type, in which one party is right and the other party lis 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 structural-static rather than evolutionary or even dialectical, though I have some hesitation in putting him in thiis 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 Galtung's thought, however, one suspects that change is always related to

some kind of normative evaluation. There are some things about the world that he thinks are bad and he wants them to be better. 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 dialectical alternates. Galtung's thought is very heavily normative, to the point perhaps where the description of reality 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 rsaying that the state of the world goes from bad to better or from bad to worse, and of the impact of these perceptions on the actual dynamics of the world as it spreads into the future. I regard normative science, however, as a dangerous occupation, even though I believe it is 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 scientific community strong emphasis is placed on defenses against this type of distortion of perception. Much of the paraphernelia of science, whether of experiments, sampling, or statistical testing, can be thought of as a kind of ritual designed to protect the scientist 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 perceptions of reality rather than the values themselves. If this seems to make the scientist 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 affects 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.

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This is a real dilemma and it can lead into serious role conflicatbetween 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 itru'thof the overall patterns of dynamics whiich lead 'to a reduction 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 percepbion. While I am on methodological issues I might mention two other methodologicoal quarrels. One is that Galtung's thought strikes me as too Itaxonomic in 'a world that is essentially continuous and in which taxonomy is usually a convenience of Ithe human mind rather than a description of reality. His penchant for matrices 'and for putting things in their pigeonholes, 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 periphery, and so on, in a world which is much more complex in its speciation and more continuous than any dichotomy can accomplish. On the other hand - and this may sound inconsistent with the foregoing - the structural nature of his thought prevents him sometimes from perceiving the real discontinuities and the pattern'sof the world. He tends to underestimate the large elements of randomness in social systems and the extraordinary difficulty whi,ch is introduced '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 replaced 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 history 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 lincidence in 'time cannot 'be known. It is the incidence of these probabilistic events in time which creates the actual temporal pattern of history. I would certainly not call Galtung a strict determinist, but there does seem to be a certain underlying tendency for a structuralistto 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 is negative war. I !am not sure indeed that the terms positive and negative are very useful here. What we perceive in ithe international 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 sys'tem of warring groups. It is not just 'not-war' any more than water is 'not ice'. Both peace and war are complex phases of the system, each with its own characteristiics. The term 'positive peace', by which Galtung 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 sen'se 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 it, though even this would not be true in everybody's estimation. There are people who have loved war and thought 'it was better 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 important to clarify the distinction between the negative and the positive in the social sciences than it is in physics, where the prin-

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ciples of simple algebra hold and minus minus is always plus. In social systems minus minus is not the same as plus. Refraining from producing a bad, that is, from doing harm, is a very different thing from producing a good, and threats, a proposed exchange of negative goods, is extraordinarily different from the exchange of positive goods. It is this confusion between the negative and the positive which perhaps leads Galtung 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 potential. The second law of thermodynamics can be generalized by saying that if anything happens 'it is because there is a potential for its happening, but after it has happened 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. Galtung is all for the increase of social entropy so far as that means destruction of organization 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 distributed throughout space so that nothing more can 'conceivably happen, as

the ultimate heaven, or perhaps one should say Nirvana, towards which all this uncomfortable and unequal structure of stars and planets, life and society, will eventually move. Here we see the profound difference between the structural and the evolutionary points of view. The structural point of view turns out to be inimical to the ideal of structure itself, and sees structure as the enemy of equality - 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 increasing thermodynamic disorder elsewhere, in our case of course nicely segregated in the sun about which we don't have to worry. The structuralist sees pollution in the structure whether it is smoke, slums or vice and says 'away with it. The evolutionist sees pollution as part of the price of evolution itself. Gal'tung's misunderstandings about entropy derive, one suspects, from the cardinal principle of his normative system, the overwhelmingly strong value which he gives to equality as such. One almost suspect's that Galtung would prefer a society in which everybody were equally desti'tuterather than one in which some were destitute and 'some were rich. A passion for equality as such, however, can 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 wi'thout 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 indeed if any of us did this we would probably decide that we did not like it af'ter all! But the drive for equality as such is extremely strong in all his writings.

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This does mean that he tends to underestimate the costs 'of equality, which to my mind at least, Ican be very high, first in terms of a lack of quality, second in terms of a lack of liberty. Quality is a peak achievement, not average achievement, and an society would have to forego the egalitbarian A thoroughly egalitarian society could peaks. 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 Ithis in terms of his productivity, it 'is ironic that an egalitarian society could never conceivably 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 that unlike the more extreme egali;tarians,he does put a high value on liberty. Liberty, however, involves property, for property is that within which we have liberty, and property always involves a dynamic which 'destroysequality, for some people use it well and some ill, some accumulate 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 inequality 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 egalitarianism inevitably implies restrictions on individual liberty wh'ich are unacceptable to me and which I suspect would really be unacceptable to Galtung. Closely related to Galtung's horror of in-

equality is his horror of dominance, and therefore of hierarchy. He cannot stand anybody's 'being top dog in spite of the fact that he is a distinctly top dog himself because 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 communicate with everyone else. It is a device for economizing communication which is absolutely 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 impossible. Hierarchy, of course, has its costs lin 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 inefficiencies and pathologies of hierarchy nobody 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 by dismembering 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 'fromMarxism (as he has repeatedly 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 concentratbions power and exof 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-pathological 'forms of dominance which are legitimated and part of a legitimate social con-

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tract. The social contract after all is a dominance to which the dominated agree because it is worth 'the price. Galitung's hatred of dominance prevents him from ever formulating 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 it 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 misunderstanding to attribute the mass of human misery to them. Our differences here illustrate very well I think the difference between Ithe 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 argues 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 impotent, but because ;the rich and the poor have participated in different dynamic processes which are not closely related. This is the principle of 'differential development.' 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 culture encouraged innovation and thrift and the other stayed poor because its culture did not cultivate the behavior which would lead 'to riches. Here there is no exploitation, no oppression because there is no contact, but the differential dynamics of the system produces inequality. 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 mixture of b'oth these models. It 'is a paradox that 'the Marxist model is much more applicable to pre-icapitalist societies; it breaks

down as we move into capitalism, especially as we move into developed capitalism, simply because the differential development model really Itakesover. Each of the three Itheoretical frameworks produces its own dynamic. Structural thinking leads into mechanical dynamics like celestial mechanics and econometrics; dialectical thinking into dynamics of winning struggles; evolutionary thinking into a dynamics 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 that 'the evolutionary processes dominate Ithe other two. To my mind, therefore, a 'liberationism' which operates primarily 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 evolutionary and developmental processes which are the only way of getting rid of poverty and diminishing the sum of human misery. On this poinrtit seems 'to me Galtung fails to transcend the dialectical viewpoint, with which he is clearly profoundly uncomfortable, because he does not perceive the importance of 'the evolutionary process. Closely related to 'the above is the overemphasis on redistribution rather than production. This also rises out of structural thinking. Structuralists are particularly fond of the metaphor of the 'pie', which is }the total produdt, 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 redistributions are possible, but this is limited, and redistributions which destroy productivi'ty can easily make the poor worse off than they were before. An emphasis on production, however, is an emphasis on evolution. The great Marxist fallacy is that the

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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 materials into the forms of phenotypes or products. The overall productivity of a society is much more a function of its knowledge and know-how structure, lincluding organizational know-how, than it i's of natural resources or even of the labor force. Economic development, like evolution, of which it is an example, ils a process essentially in genetic 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 evolutionary mainstream of increasing know-how and so increasingtheir 'ownproductivity. Somewhat related to these misperceptions about production is the center-periphery model of Galltung, which is very dominant in hi's work and closely related to his des'ire for equality and his hatred of d'ominance. The model is not wholly inapplicable, although it obscuresthe complexity of the network of production and trade, and it becomes icompletely misleading when it assumes that raw material production belongs only to the periphery and that proce'ssing and manufacturing will always occupy the center. This is closely related to 'the 'dependencia' 'type of argument that is particularly popular in Latin America, which argues that the poor are poor because they have poor term's of 'trade with 'the rich on account of the political power or dominance of the rich. This, again, goes back to a structuralist view o'f th'e world and 'there is not really very much evidence to support it. Occasionally good 'terms of trade, in the case of Japanese silk in the latter part of the nineteenth century or Swedish timber in the to same period, have 'contri'buted 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 ouitof 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' thesis Ithat internal cultures are far more important in determining Ithe movement of a society away from poverty Itowvard riches than any external relationship, including terms of trade, is supported by the fact that 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, Canada, the Unilted States, and Sweden are examples of the former; Argentina, Uruguay and Chile are examples of the laltter. The whole cen'ter-periphery argument disintegrates in the light of evolutionary dynamics. Peripheries become centers, centers become peripheries, and there is very li'ttle evidence that centers have any permanent power or even much redis'tributivepower of any kind. The empires were a drain on the imperial countries and 'hinderedthe'irdevelopment. So far in 'this discussion we have barely mentioned the word peace, which is a reflecti'on of the fact perhaps that Galtung's thought is a very large-scale system of which hi's work on peace and conflict is only a part, although a very 'important part, and the pait perhaps which motivated the whole. He has, however, made one important contribution to the general theory of conflict. This is the distinction which he m'akes between associative solutions to conflict situati'ons and dissociative solutions. Asso'ciative solutions involve some kind of agreement, some merging of identity of the conflicting parties, perhaps some superordinate structure or organization so that the 'conflict is merged, as i'twere, in 'the larger general will. Dissociative solutions 'are those which involve property or boundaries, good fences making go'od neighbors, keeping people

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away from each other, and so on. Galtung does not reject the dissociative solutions in principle, but he clearly has a very strong prejudice in favor of the associative solutions. This is perhaps a little inconsistent with some of his other positions, as associative 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 Galtung'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 religion which for all its difficulties of attainment has had a profound effect on the dreams of the human future. But in Galtung's case it does raise obstacles to perceiving the problem of the optimum mixture of the associative and dissociative elements in conflict resolution and indeed in the larger 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 dissociative 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 solutions. 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 agreement is a fantastically scarce commodity with a very high potential cost, economizing it seems like a good thing. I would, therefore, give a much higher ethical value to the dissociative solutions than Galtung does, although the problem of the right mix is a very difficult one which we are a long way from having solved. Finally, we come to the great Galtung metaphors of 'structural violence' 'and 'posi-

tive peace'. They are metaphors rather than models, and for that very reason are suspect. Metaphors always imply models and metaphors have much more persuasive power than models do, for models tend to be the preserve of the specialist. But when a metaphor implies a bad model it can be very dangerous, for it is both 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 condition 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 modern world at least there is not very much. Violence, whether of the streets and the home, or of the guerilla, of the police, or of the armed forces, is a very different phenomenon 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 everything else. There is a very real problem of the structures which lead to violence, but unfortunately Galitung'smetaphor of structural violence as he has used it has diverted attention from this problem. Violence in the behavioral 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 underlie violence are a very important and much neglected part of peace research and indeed of social science in general. Threshold phenomena like violence are difficult to

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study because they represent 'breaks' in the systenm rather than uniformities. Violence, whether between persons or organizations, occurs when the 'strain' on a system is too great for its 'strength'. 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 difficult to separate them. The diminution of violence involves two possible strategies, or a mixture of the two; one is Itheincrease in the strength of the system, 'the other is the diminution of the strain. The strength of systems involves habit, culture, taboos, and sanctions, all these 'things which enable a system to stand lincreasing strain without breaking down into violence. The strains on the system 'are largely dynamic in character, such as arms races, mutually stimulated hostility, changes in relative economic position or political power, which are often hard to identify. Conflicts of interest 'are only part 'of the strain on a system, and not always the most important part. It is very hard for people ito know their interests, and misperceptions of 'interest 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 percepti'on and reality can be very large and resistant to change. However, what Galitung calls structural violence (which has been defined 'byone unkind commenltatoras anything that Galitung doesn't like) was originally defined as any unnecessarily low expectation of life, on that assumption that anybody who dies before the allotted span has been killed, however unintentionally and unknowingly, by somebody else. The concept has been expanded to include all 'theproblems of poverty, destitution, 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 whi'ch produce violence.

This is not rto say that the cultures of violence and the cultures of poverty are not sometimes related, though not all poverty cultures are cultures of violence, and certainly not all cultures of violence are poverty cultures. But the dynamics lof poverty and the success or failure to rise out of it are of a complexity far beyond anything which the metaphor of structural violence can offer. While the metaphor of structural violence performed a service in calling attention to a problem, it may have d'one 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 Lewis Richardson perceived in his theory of arms races, which Anatol Rapoport perceived in hi's study of the prisoner's dilemma, and which Garrett Hardin perceived in the tragedy of the commons that there are in society perverse dynamic processes by whiich social systems go from bad (to worse rather than from bad to 'better, in spilte of the great principle of decision that everybody does what he thinks is best at the 'time.The analysis of these processesof perverse dynamics is the key to successful intervention in human betterment. And intervention there must be. Things left merely to themselves follow the law of entropy, that is, 'the law of 'the exhaustion of potential, whether of thermodynamic potential in equalizing 'temperatures, of biological potential in aging, or of social potential in the corruption and decline of societies and organizations. The generalized second law says all things go naturally from bad to worse unless there is re-creation of potential. The understanding of how things go from 'bad to worse 'and how intervention can reverse this 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 'tasksof the human race. The relation of normative science to peace research is an important question, partly se-

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mantic, but it has some substance. What realize himself, of seeing that a normative Galtung has tried to do with the concepts of science was a serious human endeavor. structural violence and positive peace has A further principle which the Galtung exbeen to expand Itheconcept of peace research perience suggests is the extraordinary diffiinto a general normative science. In prin- culty of being really interdisciplinary. Part ciple this seems (to me a very important con- of the failures of the Galtung system arise tribution and it could well be that one of one suspects from the fact that he is prithe most important fruits of the peace re- marily a sociologist and that he really does search movement would be precisely to have not understand Ithe contribution of economit expand into a general movement for ics. As a good many economists do not seem normative science, which would concern it- to understand it ei'ther, this perhaps can be self not merely with peace and war, or even forgiven! As an intellectual Galtung dislikes with violence, but with all the ills that business and the commonplaceness of the afflict the human race, and would involve marketplace, and the appareitly vulgar and an orderly way of thinking aibout these dissociative character of commercial life. things in the hope of more successful nor- This leads him to underestimate the moral mative lintervention. So much harm is done value of exchange as a social organizer, imwith the motivation of doing good that plying as it does equality of status, even as it is clear that a good normative science is it may lead to inequality in wealth. Galta very high priority. Within this, 'the study ung's deep ambivalence towards socialism of peace and war in the international sys- reflects perhaps an inability to choose betem, and of the larger problem of personal tween what is perceived as the tyranny of and group violence, form important subsets. the market and the tyranny of the state. If Other subsets would include medicine, crim- we reject exchange and the property instituinology, psychiatry, family studies, religious tion on which it rests we are all too likely to studies, poverty studies, and so on, which get not love 'butthreat a's a major organizing would cover between them the whole field factor of society, as the history of the comof the social systems and indeed beyond this munist states abundantly demonstrates. Here into the biological and physical systems again, we come back to the need for a mix which so profoundly affect the fate of the of 'the associative and dissoci'ative elements human race. in social life 'if we are really 'to move from Ultimately, normative science would have bad to 'better instead of from bad to worse. to 'include 'the study 'of the earth, or any It seems almost indecent to write an exother human habitation, as a total system tended review of so importarit a work withfrom the point of view of human interven- out footnotes, bu!t I have deliberately tried tion for human betterment. Normative sci- to paint a broad canvas. There are enough ence does not have to produce a universal inconsistencies in every creative mind so agreement as to the defini'tion of human that it is easy to misinterpret ilt in detail. I betterment. The study of various images of am sure in some point or other I have misit will be part of its field. Galtung's mistake interpreted what Galtung has to say and I it seems 'to me was to take the concept and would be most happy to be corrected. theoretical structures which were appropri- Furthermore, I have left out 'a large number ate to part of normative namely of important detail's - 'the discussion of disscience, peace research, 'and try and apply these to armament, for instance, the delightful prothe whole, which cannot really 'be done. posals for turning the Catholic Church into This is an error, however, which can easily a gigantic Society of Friends, the empirical be corrected and it should not be allowed to studies of public opinion and of the subdetract from his major achievement, the culture of the United Nations' forces, and magnitude of which perhaps he did not even the innumerable flashes of insight that oc-

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cur in every chapter. 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 ilts readers to study the volumes themselves, it will have accomplished a major purpose. It will only really be useful, however, if it can stimulate an ongoing dialogue.

VISITING

FELLOWSHIPS

The International Peace Research Institute, Oslo, each year grants a number of visiting fellowships to researchers or post-graduate students for stays at the Institute. Fellowships are usually granted for 2-3 months, at a monthly rate of N.Cr. 3,000-3,500 (approximately US $600). The main aim of the fellowship program is Ito encourage cooperation between researchers and institutes with common interests in peace research. Preference is given to applicants from the Third World and from countrieswith non-convertible currencies.Travel costs are not covered. Applications for the second half of 1977, and spring 1978, should be received by 15 April, 1977. We do not use an application form, but we would like to have information on academic and practical background, with a list of publications, and in particular data on current research interests and plans for the stay in Norway. Applications should be sent to The Director, International Peace Research Institute, Raadhusgaten4, N-Oslo 1, NORWAY who can also give further information on the Institute and its activities.