Memorial Page for Johan Galtung

Johan Vincent Galtung (born 24 October 1930 in Oslo; died 17 February 2024 in Bærum, Norway) was a Norwegian sociologist, mathematician and peace researcher. He is regarded as one of the most important founders of modern peace and conflict research. Through the Peace Research Institute Oslo, the Journal of Peace Research and concepts such as structural violence, negative peace and positive peace, he gave a young field of study language, institutions and international visibility.

Oslo, study and conscience

Galtung was born in Oslo and experienced the German occupation of Norway as a child. His father, a physician, treated wounded people during the war without regard to nationality; this later became a point of reference for Galtung's thinking about violence, responsibility and human security. When he was called up for Norwegian military service in 1951, he refused on grounds of conscience. He used his time in prison to study Gandhi and nonviolent conflict behavior. At the University of Oslo, he combined mathematics, sociology and statistics into a way of working that sought to examine questions of peace not only morally, but systematically.

Building peace research

After a period at Columbia University, Galtung returned to Norway and built a department for conflict and peace research at the Norwegian Institute for Social Research. From this developed the Peace Research Institute Oslo, whose early years remained closely connected with him. In 1964 he founded the Journal of Peace Research, which became a central international forum for the field. In 1969 he took up a professorship in conflict and peace research at the University of Oslo. This gave academic weight to a field that treated violence, war, inequality and possibilities for peace as connected questions.

Concepts that remained

Galtung's 1969 article Violence, Peace, and Peace Research is among his most cited works. In it he distinguished between direct violence and structural violence: for him, violence could also operate where social structures deprive people of life chances, health, security or freedom. From this he developed the distinction between negative peace, the absence of direct violence, and positive peace, which aims at more just and sustainable structures. These concepts were taken up worldwide because they allowed peace work to be understood beyond ceasefires and treaty logic.

Mediation, travel and Transcend

Galtung was not only a university teacher. He traveled widely, lectured, advised actors in conflicts and searched for practical ways of transforming conflict. In 1987 he received the Right Livelihood Award; in 1993 he founded Transcend with Fumiko Nishimura, an organization intended to connect peace work, development and mediation. His strength lay in reading conflicts not only as zero-sum struggles, but in asking what new arrangements might allow contradictory interests to be handled differently. This connection of theory, advice and public intervention made him internationally known.

Criticism and limits

Galtung's public role remained controversial. Colleagues honored his founding achievements, but also described some of his later positions as polemical and harder to follow. In 2012 the Norwegian Human-Etisk Forbund criticized statements by Galtung about alleged Jewish power and his reference to the antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, calling them poor judgment and a departure from humanist values. This criticism is part of his public record: it shows that his authority as a peace researcher did not make every later political statement convincing or defensible.

Farewell

Johan Galtung died in Bærum on 17 February 2024 at the age of 93. His life's work reaches from mathematically informed sociology through institution-building to practical conflict mediation. What remains above all is the attempt to take peace seriously as a research question: not merely as the absence of war, but as work on the conditions under which violence becomes less likely and human life becomes freer.