"Peace is not so nice as you think; it is generated by violence; it embodies violence; and it in turn generates violence." Discuss.

There exists a seemingly incontestable understanding that peace is the ideal state towards which all peoples strive, that it is the direct opposite of the evils that characterize war. However, one need only scratch the surface of this peace to recognize that this assumption is naïve, that peace as it is commonly perceived is indeed not so nice as you think, at least not for everyone.

In the same way that war has its functions and distinct beneficiaries, so too peace often has its winners and losers and therefore also its inherent conflicts and embedded violence.

In this essay I will consider the statement in its three parts. First I will stress the idea that institutional structures in time of peace can maintain a distorted social equilibrium, often serving a distinct social group to the detriment of another, taking Johan Galtung’s seminal theory on structural violence as a starting point and investigating embedded violence in Brazil; second, I will put forward the notion that actual violence often evolves as a mere continuation of the violence embedded in social inequalities, using the Rwandan genocide as an extreme case study; and third I will consider how actual violence can generate peace processes, looking at the relatively successful case of Northern Ireland and the less successful case of Israel/Palestine.

In his influential work on structural violence, Johan Galtung describes violence as “the cause of the difference between the potential and the actual, between what could have been and what is” (Galtung 1969, 168), present when human beings are prevented from reaching their full mental and physical potential in life.

Violence is then not only direct actual bodily harm suffered at the hands of an actor but also incorporates all forms of inequality and social injustice. In the same study, peace is agreed to be the “absence of violence” (Galtung 1969, 168). When we understand peace in this way, it becomes clear that violence will, to a greater or lesser degree, be inherent in all societies whether in the shape of racial prejudice, lack of access to employment, education and health care, or other forms of discrimination.