JOHAN GALTUNG 1930-2024

The inspiring lecturer and world-renowned scholar Professor Johan Galtung passed away on February 17, 2024, at the age of 93. He was an early supporter of the emerging Peace Research Department at Uppsala university and became the university’s honorary doctor in 1987. Professor Peter Wallensteen recalls some of Galtung’s achievements:

The first time I met Johan Galtung was at a public dialogue with Alva Myrdal in the Uppsala University Main Building in early 1966. They discussed the future of peace research. Galtung represented the first institute in the field, the Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO) while Myrdal was chairing the committee proposing the establishment of a parallel institute in Sweden: SIPRI, neither of which was affiliated with a university or offered courses or degrees. Their discussions, thus, made clear that there was space for university-based peace research and both speakers supported such an idea.

At the time, Galtung was focused on sanctions as a non-violent method for change, notably in Rhodesia and South Africa. As this coincided with my own research, I was happy to be invited to PRIO in the following year. It turned into a life-changing experience. Galtung lectured on a variety of topics each week. His teaching style was unique, making full use of the chalk board, with elegant hypotheses and a host of evidence and data. At the same time he was provocative, with sharp-edged remarks on contemporary issues (be it the Vietnam war or Norwegian development aid).

In retrospect, I would say that Galtung’s most productive scholarly period was in the years from his founding of the Journal of Peace Research (JPR) in 1964 to the mid-1970s, when he and his many students and colleagues at PRIO demonstrated empirically the utility of many of his notions, notably “structural violence” and the connections between inequality and violence. This is also the time when he led and inspired the work at PRIO, making JPR a central publication in the field and holding the first Scandinavian chair in peace research at Oslo University (1971-1978). He is not only the originator of notions such as “peace research”, “conflict theory” and “structural violence” but also the proponent of “negative and positive peace” and the ambition to achieve “peace by peaceful means”. For me and my colleagues, as young researchers at the intellectually thriving but struggling milieu in Uppsala this was a demonstration that peace was, indeed, researchable. Galtung’s support for the establishment of a chair at Uppsala University, followed by the creation of a PhD program was highly significant. I and many others are for ever grateful.

Later, however, Galtung’s shifted his focus to politics and polemics, with ideas that no longer met the standards he himself had professed in his earlier years. It was difficult, for example, to understand his reactions to the massacres in Norway on July 22, 2011. Such actions of one-sided violence were a conflict-related phenomenon that required other conceptual tools than those Galtung would provide.

Still, it is sad to see Johan Galtung leave this world. His early writings are definitely worthy of close attention and will remain important contributions to a vibrant peace research tradition.