Johan Galtung

Johan Galtung   (activist)
Born	24 October 1930 Oslo, Norway
Died	17 February 2024 (Age 93) Oslo, Norway
Nationality	Norwegian
Alma mater	University of Oslo
Founder of	PRIO, Structural violence
Interests	Peace
Norwegian peace researcher and activist

Johan Vincent Galtung was a Norwegian sociologist and the principal founder of the discipline of peace and conflict studies.

He was the main founder of the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) in 1959 and served as its first director until 1970. After Galtung left PRIO, it was taken over by the deep state and developed into a think tank theorizing on "just wars" to "open up for democracy", thus creating a "democratic peace" that would ensure peace in the future.

Western Community

“One basic formula for understanding the Community is this: 'Take five broken empires, add the sixth one later, and make one big neo-colonial empire out of it all.”
Johan Galtung

Structural Violence

“We shall refer to the type of violence where there is an actor that commits the violence as personal or direct, and to violence where there is no such actor as structural or indirect. In both cases individuals may be killed or mutilated, hit or hurt in both senses of these words [i.e., physical and psychological], and manipulated by means of stick or carrot strategies. But whereas in the first case these consequences can be traced back to concrete persons as actors, in the second case this is no longer meaningful. There by not be any person who directly harms another in the structure. The violence is built into the structure and shows up as unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances.”
Johan Galtung (1969) 

“Violence with a clear subject-object relation is manifest because it is visible as action. ... Violence without this relation is structural, built into structure. Thus, when one husband beats his wife there is a clear case of personal violence, but when one million husbands keep one million wives in ignorance there is structural violence. Correspondingly, in a society where life expectancy is twice as high in the upper as in the lower classes, violence is exercised even if there are no concrete actors one can point to directly attacking others, as when one person kills another.”
Johan Galtung (1969) 

Awards

Johan Galtung was awarded the Right Livelihood Award in 1987 for "his systematic and multidisciplinary study of the conditions which can lead to peace".

 

A Document by Johan Galtung

Title	Document type	Publication date	Subject(s)
Document:What Lies Ahead for Libya	article	13 September 2011	NATO 2011 Attacks on Libya

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