Positive and Negative Peace

Abstract

Any concept of peace includes the absence of direct violence between states, engaged in by military and others in general, and of massive killing of categories of humans in particular. But peace would be a strange concept if it does not include relations between genders, races, classes and families, and does not also include absence of structural violence, the non-intended slow, massive suffering caused by economic and political structures in the form of massive exploitation and repression. And the absence of the cultural violence that legitimizes direct and-or structural violence.