1977 Building - Galtung

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Twelve Friendly Quarrels with Johan GaltungAuthor(s): Kenneth E. BouldingReviewed work(s):Source: Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 14, No. 1 (1977), pp. 75-86Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/423312 .

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Journal of Peace Research No. 1, Vol. XIV/1977

Twelve Friendly Quarrelswith lohan GaltungKENNETH. E. BOULDINGUniversity of ColoradoA review of Johan Galtung, 1975 and 1976, Essays in Peace Research:Vol. 1, Peace, Research, Education, Action; Vol. II, Peace, War and Defense.Copenhagen, Christian Ejlers, 406 pp. and472 pp.

This article reviews the first two volumes of the collected papersof Johan Galtung. The papersreveal Galtung as a major world thinker in the field of peace research and conflict studies.The review takes issue with him, however, on a number of points relating to such matters ashis concept of entropy, the misleading metaphorsof negative peace and structural violence,and his inability to resolve the conflict between liberty and equality. His distinction betweenassociative and dissociative solutions to conflict is recognized as a major contribution,but hisneglect of the virtues of dissociative solutions is criticized. Galtung's overall contribution,however, is very highly regarded.

There are some people like Picasso whoseoutput is so large and so varied that it ishard to believe that it comes from only oneperson. Johan Galtung falls into this cate-gory. These two suibstantial volumes of re-printed papers are only the first of five andperhaps more. They are the product of aman of enormous vitality and imagination,whose work, though centered firmly in so-ciology, straddles a number of differentfields. He shoots off ideas like an explodingrocket. He writes for the international audi-

*With this invited article by Kenneth Bould-ing, the Journal of Peace Research publishes thefirst of what we hope will become a semi-regularfeature: major 'review essays' of particularly im-portant books or series of books. While we do notfeel that we have the space for regular book re-views, apart from our brief 'book notes', we feela need to discuss in depth occasional works ofparticular importance to peace research. It is inno way accidental that the first selection is thetwo first volumes of essays by Johan Galtung,many of which were first published in thisjournal. (In fact, some of these essays made thejournal.) It is, however, coincidental that Galtung,editor of the JPR during its first ten years, nowleaves the editorial committee. We are confidentthat this does not end his association with theJournal, as contributor, advisor, and friendlycritic.

ence in English (not his native language),but apart from occasional lapses into socio-logical jargon, he writes with a fluency,style and clarity which could well be theenvy of those who learned English at theirmother's knee. Because his work has beenscattered in articles rather than condensedin treatises, these volumes are particularlywelcome and they give the reader a veryfair sample of the range of Galtung'sthought. We will all look forward, indeed,to the remaining volumes to fill out the pic-ture. Some repetitiveness, of course, is inev-itable in a collection of this kind, but, asmuch of what Galtung has 'to say is worthsaying more than once, a certain redundan-cy does not detract from the value of thevolumes.It is virtually impossible to review in de-tail a collection as rich and diverse as thethirty-three papers contained in these twovolumes. The essays are classified roughlyby topic, though there is naturally a gooddeal of overlap. In the first volume /there isan introductory section, mainly theoretical,on peace in general; then a section on peaceresearch; one on peace education; one onpeace action. The second volume is morespecific and sociological. There is a sectionon war and arms races, which is mainly


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76 Kenneth E. BouldingFigure 1.

Structural Dialectical EvolutionaryTabooon Violence Johan Herman KennethGaltung Schmid BouldingTalcott Marx, GarrettNo TabooonViolence Ps Ln,Parsons Lenin,Mao Hardin

theoretical; one on public opinion and dis-armament, which is mainly sociological-empirical; a section on peacekeeping, peace-making and peacebuilding, which is mainlyreports; and a section on nonmilitary de-fense, which is mainly sociological andtheoretical. The third volume promises to bemore theoretical still; the fourth volume willbe on world structure,and the fifth on casestudies - these have not yet been published.I respect and admire Galtung; I have pro-fited from his friendship. Nevertheless, I dofind myself in quite sharp disagreementwithmany of his positions, and perhaps the mostuseful thing I can do in this review is to ex-plain these disagreements, even at the costof sounding a little cantankerous and per-sonal. Galtung himself is fond of puttingthings in matrices, so I will begin with oneto try to place both Galtung and myself ina setting (Figure 1). Here I postulate threebroad types lof theoretical approach to theworld, which I have called the 'structural',the 'dialectical' (and the 'evolutionary'.ThenI have classified each 'of these as to whethera taboo of some sort on violence was im-portant in the thought of the writer.

Strudtural theorists think mainly in termsof static patterns and formls.Even when theytry to be dynamic they end up with four-dimensional structures in space-time, likecelestial mechanics or econometrics. Theytend to be a little uneasy with dynamics,however, and tend to evaluate the world interms of the structures which it exhibits ata moment of time. I put Galtung ratherfirmly in this category, among those whohave a taboo on violence. Many of theworkers in quantitative peace research and'polymetrics' really fall into this category,

such as Rudolph J. Rummel, David Singer,and even Lewis F. Richardson, the Englishmeteorologist who in many ways was thefather of peace research. Structural thinkerswith no taboo on violence are, of course,many. I use Talcott Parsons as an example,for in many ways I think Galtung's thoughtis Parsonian. But Max Weber, Walras, Vil-fredo Pareto, and many other highly re-spectable social scientists can be put, with alittle pushing and stretching, into this pi-geonhole.The second category is that of dialecticaltheorists who see the world primarily interms of the interaction through struggle oflarge structures, such as classes or nations.Of those without a taboo on violence, Marx,Lenin and Mao may of course be the mostfamous, but one might also put Clausewitz,and of course Hegel, the father of dialectics,into this category. It is hard to find dialec-tical thinkers who have a taboo on violence,as struggle is so importantto them. To thosewho think that the dynamics of the worldconsists of winning struggles, a !taboo onviolence may seem very confining. How-ever, I have put Herman Schmid, the Swed-ish Communistpeace researcher in this cate-gory, with the understanding that the taboomay not be absolute.Evolutionary theorists look upon theworld essentially as a disequilibrium systemconsisting of the ecological interaction ofinnumerablespecies, interacting under condi-tions of constant Ichangeof parameters (mu-tation). The dominant mode of relationshipis interaction not 'struggle,' in spite of Dar-win's unfortunate and quite inaccurate met-aphor about the 'struggle for existence'.Strictly dialectical processes are regarded as


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Twelve Friendly Quarrelsvery rare in biological evolution and of onlyoccasional significance in social evolution,the major dynamics of which is regarded asnondialectical and ecological. In this viewthe structures that emerge out of the evolu-tionary process are simply cross sections ofthat process at a point or in a period of time,although in their turn, of course, thesestructures may help to determine subse-quent developments. I place myself, ofcourse, very firmly in this category, with ataboo on violence. Evolutionary thinkerswith no taboo on violence go back, I wouldargue, certainly to Adam Smith, AlfredMarshall, and Charles Darwin. I have putGarrett Hardin of the 'tragedy of the com-mons' as an outstanding modern represen-tative.

Looking at Galtung as I do from some-what the opposite end of the structural-evo-lutionary continuum, I have a number ofsmall dialectical quarrels to pick with him.I should explain that I regard these mainlyas structural dialectics rather than as evo-lutionary dialectics, structural dialectics be-ing situations where contradictions are notresolved but represent in themselves and intheir continuing tensions a more adequaterepresentation of reality than any resolu-tion or synthesis could be. The yin and yangof ancient Chinese thought is a good ex-ample. On the other hand, some of thesedisagreements may be of the evolutionary-dialectical type, in which one party is rightand the other party lis wrong, and whichmay be resolved, therefore, in evolutionaryterms by some kind of 'victory' of one overthe other.My first quarrel then is that Galtung'sthought is structural-static rather than evo-lutionary or even dialectical, though I havesome hesitation in putting him in thiis boxbecause he is not really an equilibriumtheorist. I am sure he would agree with methat equilibrium is a useful figment of thehuman imagination and is unknown in thereal world, which is subject to constantchange. In Galtung's thought, however, onesuspects that change is always related to

some kind of normative evaluation. Thereare some things about the world that hethinks are bad and he wants them to be bet-ter. This is fine, but most change is not aresult of normativeevaluations.This leads me to my second quarrel,whichis more a matter of emphasisthan of dialec-tical alternates. Galtung's thought is veryheavily normative, to the point perhapswhere the description of reality suffers. Imust tread lightly at the point for my ownthought is also very normative. I regardpeace research, for instance, as essentially asubdiscipline within what I would like tocall 'normative science', which consists ofthe serious study of what we mean by rsayingthat the state of the world goes from bad tobetter or from bad to worse, and of the im-pact of these perceptions on the actual dy-namics of the world as it spreads into thefuture. I regard normative science, however,as a dangerous occupation, even though Ibelieve it is necessary. There is always adanger that our norms act as a filter whichleads to a perversion of our image of reality.

We all tend to see the world somewhat aswe want to see it and all thinking is in somedegree wishful, but in the values of the scien-tific community strong emphasis is placedon defenses against this type of distortionof perception. Much of the paraphernelia ofscience, whether of experiments, sampling,or statistical testing, can be thought of as akind of ritual designed to protect the scien-tist against wishful thinking and perception.Another defense is that norms should beseparated from affect as far as possible.Values can be held clearly without strongfeelings and emotions, and one suspects thatit is feelings and emotions that distort per-ceptions of reality rather than the valuesthemselves. If this seems to make the scien-tist into a rather cold fish, perhaps we haveto face the fact that the scientist should bea rather cold fish and that emotions and af-fects should be reserved for those who donot hold the scientific ethic and who areprepared to employ the arts of persuasionand deceit in the interest of their beliefs.

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78 Kenneth E. BouldingThis is a real dilemma and it can lead intoserious role conflicatbetween the warm andcomplete human being burning with angerat oppression, poverty, violence, and insultsto human dignity, and the cool scientistseeking to perceive the itru'thof the overallpatterns of dynamics whiichlead 'to a reduc-tion of these evils. Galtung hovers betweenthe two roles and this is not to his discredit.But the tension may not always be resolvedin a way which avoids distortion of percep-bion.While I am on methodological issues Imight mention two other methodologicoalquarrels. One is that Galtung's thoughtstrikesme as too Itaxonomicin 'a world that is es-sentially continuous and in which taxonomyis usually a convenience of Ithehuman mindrather than a description of reality. Hispenchant for matrices 'andfor putting thingsin their pigeonholes, as I did in Figure 1, isan example of this tendency. He constantlythinks, however, in terms of dichotomies -structural versus behavioral violence, topdogs versus under dogs, center versusperiph-ery, and so on, in a worldwhich is muchmorecomplex in its speciation and more con-tinuous than any dichotomy can accomplish.On the other hand - and this may soundinconsistent with the foregoing - the struc-tural nature of his thought prevents himsometimes from perceiving the real discon-tinuities and the pattern'sof the world. Hetends to underestimate the large elements ofrandomness in social systems and the extra-ordinary difficulty whi,ch is introduced 'intothe perception of social systems by frequentbut unpredictableparametric change, that is,by what might be called 'system 'breaks', nwhich a previous set of regularities is re-placed by a new set. There is no necessaryreason why structural thinking should leadto a neglect of randomness,as we can easilythrow random elements into structures, butin evolutionary thinking randomness is avery essential element. The belief that his-tory had to happen the way it did is just anillusion of historians. The record is that ofa succession of improbableevents that some-

how came off. Social systems are full ofthings like 'hundred-year floods', events theprobability of which is roughly known butwhere 'the lincidence in 'time cannot 'beknown. It is the incidence of these proba-bilistic events in time which creates the ac-tual temporal pattern of history. I wouldcertainly not call Galtung a strict determi-nist, but there does seem to be a certain un-derlying tendency for a structuralistto thinkin ratherdeterministicterms.Another quarrel, partly one of semanticsbut also going a little deeper than that, isthat Galtung seems to me to have a certaincarelessness in the definition of positive andnegative terms. The expression 'negativepeace' of which he is very fond seems to mea complete misnomer. What he is talkingabout is negative war. I !amnot sure indeedthat the terms positive and negative are veryuseful here. What we perceive in ithe inter-national system is a phase system with twofairly well defined phases of war and peace,which constantly succeed each other, just aswater freezes into ice and ice remelts intowater as the temperature falls and risesagain. Peace is a phase of a sys'temof war-ring groups. It is not just 'not-war' any morethan water is 'not ice'. Both peace and warare complex phases of the system, each withits own characteristiics.The term 'positive peace', by which Galt-ung seems to mean any state of affairs whichgets high marks on his scale of goodness, isalso most unfortunate. It is not in 'any sen'sethe opposite of negative peace. In fact itmay have very little 'to do with peace. Peacein the phase sense is almost certainly a partof it, though even this would not be true ineverybody's estimation. There are peoplewho have loved war and thought 'it was bet-ter than peace, and while this is not part ofmy own values as a normative scientist, Ihave to admit that it has been part of somepeople's values in the past and may evencontinue to be so. It is much more impor-tant to clarify the distinction between thenegative and the positive in the social sci-ences than it is in physics, where the prin-


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Twelve Friendly Quarrels 79ciples of simple algebra hold and minusminus is always plus. In social systemsminusminus is not the same as plus. Refrainingfrom producing a bad, that is, from doingharm, is a very different thing from produc-ing a good, and threats, a proposed ex-change of negative goods, is extraordinarilydifferent from the exchange of positivegoods.It is this confusion between the negativeand the positive which perhaps leads Galt-ung into what seems to me to be a profoundmisunderstandingof the entropy concept, asexpounded particularly in the second essayof Volume I, which is an important clue tohis whole value system. In thermodynamicsthe entropy 'conceptwas defined negatively,perhaps unfortunately, though it did not doas much harm as the phlogiston concept inchemistry, which turned out to be negativeoxygen. Entropy is essentially negative po-tential. The second law of thermodynamicscan be generalized by saying that if any-thing happens 'it is because there is a poten-tial for its happening, but after it has hap-pened that potential has been used up. Adecrease in potential through its realization,therefore, is the same thing as the increaseof entropy. Potential, however, because itis a positive concept, is much easier to graspthan the conceptof entropy.Because of his passion for equality, hishatred of hierarchy, dominance, top dogs,and anything which looks like oppression(much of which is praiseworthy), Galtungidentifies entropy as a symbol of goodnessand regards negentropy, that is, structure,improbability, and potential, as evil. Galt-ung is all for the increase of social entropyso far as that means destruction of organi-zation and hierarchy, the dissipation ofwealth, 'and the reduction of everything toa dead level. It would almost seem as ifGaltung would regard the last ultimatewhimper of the universe, according to thesecond law of thermodynamics,in which allthings are at an equal temperature andequally distributed throughout space so thatnothing more can 'conceivably happen, as

the ultimate heaven, or perhaps one shouldsay Nirvana, towards which all this uncom-fortable and unequal structure of stars andplanets, life and society, will eventuallymove.Here we see the profound difference be-tween the structural and the evolutionarypoints of view. The structuralpoint of viewturns out to be inimical to the ideal of struc-ture itself, and sees structure as the enemyof equality - which it is. The evolutionarypoint of view sees the whole evolutionaryprocess as the segregation of entropy, thebuilding up of little castles of order in thecrystal, in DNA, in life, in humans, and intheir innumerable artifacts both personal,material and organizational, always at thecost, accordingto the second law, of increas-ing thermodynamic disorder elsewhere, inour case of course nicely segregated in thesun about which we don't have to worry.The structuralist sees pollution in the struc-ture whether it is smoke, slums or vice andsays 'away with it. The evolutionist seespollution as part of the price of evolutionitself.Gal'tung'smisunderstandings about entro-py derive, one suspects, from the cardinalprinciple of his normative system, the over-whelmingly strong value which he gives toequality as such. One almost suspect'sthatGaltung would prefer a society in whicheverybody were equally desti'tuterather thanone in which some were destitute and 'somewere rich. A passion for equality as such,however, can easily lead into the hatred ofthe rich without any love for the poor. Onecan put a very strong negative value onpoverty and believe it should be abolishedwi'thout believing in equality at all. Thiswould lead to a society with a floor belowwhich nobody were allowed to fall, butabove which a high degree of inequalitywould be tolerable. Galtung nowhere spellsout what his ideal society would be, and in-deed if any of us did this we would probablydecide that we did not like it af'terall! Butthe drive for equality as such is extremelystrong in all his writings.


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80 Kenneth E. BouldingThis does mean that he tends to under-estimate the costs 'of equality, which to mymind at least,Icanbe very high, first in termsof a lack of quality, second in terms of alack of liberty. Quality is a peak achieve-ment, not average achievement, and anegalitbarian ociety would have to forego thepeaks. A thoroughly egalitarian society couldnever have produced the peaks of art orliterature 'or science. It is a curious paradoxhere that Galtung himself is a distinctlyhigh-quality person and violates his owncanons of equality. He is of the mountains,not the plains. His real income is far above

the world average. He travels extensivelyaround the world. Like myself 'he belongs tothe intellectual jet set, and, while I wouldhave no difficulty in justifying Ithisin termsof his productivity, it 'is ironic that an egali-tarian society could never conceivably haveproduced Galtung himself.Furthermore, Galtung never really facesthe possibility that equality involves a lossof liberty. There are several passages in hiswork which suggest that unlike the more ex-treme egali;tarians,he does put a high valueon liberty. Liberty, however, involves prop-erty, for property is that within which wehave liberty, and property always involvesa dynamic which 'destroysequality, for somepeople use it well and some ill, some accu-mulate and some decumulate. The famous'Matthew principle' from the Gospel ofMatthew - to him that hath shall be given- ensures that once an equality of propertyis destroyed, even by random forces, thenif there is liberty it is easier for those withmore, and harder for those with less, to getmore, until some kind of equilibrium of in-equality is achieved. While 'thereis a strongcase for restrictive definitions of privateproperty and for the establishmentof manykinds of social property in the interests ofgreater equality, a throughgoing egalitarian-ism inevitably implies restrictions on indi-vidual liberty wh'ichare unacceptable to meand which I suspect would really be unac-ceptable to Galtung.Closely related to Galtung's horror of in-

equality is his horror of dominance, andtherefore of hierarchy. He cannot stand any-body's 'being top dog in spite of the factthat he is a distinctly top dog himself be-cause of his high quality. This leads to analmost total rejection of 'hierarchy as aprinciple of social organization. Yet onesuspects he has never really examined theprice of this rejection. Hierarchy is the pricethat we pay for any organization beyond thesmall group in which everybody can com-municate with everyone else. It is a devicefor economizingcommunicationwhich is ab-solutely necessary in organizations'beyondahandful of people. Even with a hundredpeople, there are 9,900 possible pairs, andcommunication between all the pairs is im-possible.Hierarchy, of course,has its costs lin termsof 'corruptionof information and in termsof concentration of power, and it is a fairlygeneral proposition that the more powerfula decision-maker, the more likely are thedecisions to be 'bad ones. That there are in-efficiencies and pathologies of hierarchy no-body can doubt. These must be dealt with,however, within the structure of hierarchyitself and cannot be dealt with by abolishingit. To try to solve human problems by dis-membering hierarchy and creating the 'socialentropy of disorganization seems to mewholly illusory. Galtung's recognition of thepathologies of hierarchy is probably whatsaves him 'fromMarxism (as he has repeated-ly stated, he is not a Marxist), for Marxcompletely failed to come to grips with theproblems of hierarchy, and for this reasonI think has almost certainly done more harmthan good. It is one of the great ironies ofhistory that the socialist movement, basedon a very legitimate demand for greaterequality and participation, has resulted inenormous concentratbions f power and ex-tremely pathological hierarchies. To deny allvalidity to dominance is to me to denya human problem of very high priority,which is the development of non-pathologi-cal 'forms of dominance which are legiti-mated and part of a legitimate social con-


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Twelve Friendly Quarrels 81tract. The social contract after all is a dom-inance to which the dominated agree becauseit is worth 'the price. Galitung's hatred ofdominance prevents him from ever formu-lating this problem.Closely related to his hatred of dominanceis the view that poverty and inequality aremainly the result of oppression, that is, thedominance of the dominant, and the way toget rid of it is to remove the dominant fromtheir positions. While no one can deny thatdominance and oppression are real problemsin the world, 'it seems to me a gross misun-derstanding to attribute the mass of humanmisery to them. Our differences here illu-strate very well I think the difference be-tween Ithe structural and the evolutionaryapproach. The structuralist looks at theworld and sees that some people are richand some people are poor because of thestructures of property and power, and ar-gues that if only the rich were poorer andless powerful the poor would be richer andmore powerful. The view is attractive in itssimplicity. Unfortunately, it is probably anillusion. The rich are not rich and powerfulbecause the poor are poor and impotent, butbecause ;the rich and the poor have partici-pated in different dynamic processes whichare not closely related.This is the principle of 'differential devel-opment.' In the extreme model we mightpostulate two islands totally unconnected,and starting off at an equal level, one ofwhich got rich because its culture encour-aged innovation and thrift and the otherstayed poor because its culture did not culti-vate the behavior which would lead 'toriches.Here there is no exploitation, no oppressionbecause there is no contact, but the differen-tial dynamics of the system produces in-equality. At the other extreme we have theMarxist model in which the poor, or at leastthe working class, produce everything andthe rich take it all away fromthem exceptthebarest subsistence.The real world is a mix-ture of b'oth these models. It 'is a paradoxthat 'the Marxist model is much more appli-cable to pre-icapitalist societies; it breaks

down as we move into capitalism, especiallyas we move into developed capitalism,simply because the differential developmentmodel really Itakes ver.Each of the three Itheoreticalframeworksproduces its own dynamic. Structuralthink-ing leads into mechanical dynamics likecelestial mechanics and econometrics; dia-lectical thinking into dynamics of winningstruggles; evolutionary thinking into a dy-namics in which genetic information orknow-how is Itheprimary field within whichchange takes place, mediated through theselective processes of ecological interaction.The real world 'is a mixture of all three andthe great problem is to identify the mix. Myown view is that 'the evolutionary processesdominate Itheother two. To my mind, there-fore, a 'liberationism' which operates pri-marily in 'the dialectical mode and looks tothe solution of human problems by gettingrid of top dogs simply produces another setof top dogs, often worse than the last, anddoes very little to promote 'the real evolu-tionary and developmental processes whichare the only way of getting rid of povertyand diminishing the sum of human misery.On this poinrt t seems 'to me Galtung fails totranscend the dialectical viewpoint, withwhich he is clearly profoundly uncomfort-able, because he does not perceive the im-portance of 'theevolutionaryprocess.Closely related to 'the above is the over-emphasis on redistribution rather than pro-duction. This also rises out of structuralthinking. Structuralistsare particularly fondof the metaphor of the 'pie', which is }thetotal produdt, which is then divided amongthe claimants. In the real world there is nopie, but a vast proliferation of little tarts,some growing faster than others. Neither ofthe metaphors is really adequate. In the caseof the public sector there is a 'pie' and re-distributions are possible, but this is limited,and redistributions which destroy produc-tivi'ty can easily make the poor worse offthan they were before. An emphasis on pro-duction, however, is an emphasis on evolu-tion. The great Marxist fallacy is that the


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82 Kenneth E. Bouldingproduct comes from labor; in fact it comesfrom the social genetic structure of society- the knowledge, the know-how, and theorganizations which facilitate the ability ofthis know-how to direct energy into thetransportation and transformation of mate-rials into the forms of phenotypes or pro-ducts. The overall productivity of a societyis much more a function of its knowledgeand know-how structure, lincluding organi-zational know-how, than it i's of natural re-sourcesor even of the labor force. Economicdevelopment, like evolution, of which it isan example, ils a process essentially in ge-netic structures.In the social case, of course,this is human knowledge and know-how.Capital is merely human knowledge imposedon the material world. Thus, the poverty ofthe poor historically has been relieved verylittle by redistribution.The poor have gottenricher mainly by getting into the evolu-tionary mainstream of increasing know-howand so increasingtheir 'ownproductivity.Somewhat related to these misperceptionsabout production is the center-peripherymodel of Galltung, which is very dominantin hi'swork and closely related to his des'irefor equality and his hatred of d'ominance.The model is not wholly inapplicable, al-though it obscuresthe complexity of the net-work of production and trade, and it be-comes icompletely misleading when it as-sumes that raw material production belongsonly to the periphery and that proce'ssingand manufacturing will always occupy thecenter. This is closely related to 'the 'de-pendencia' 'type of argument that is partic-ularly popular in Latin America, which ar-gues that the poor are poor because theyhave poor term's of 'trade with 'the rich onaccount of the political power or dominanceof the rich. This, again, goes back to a struc-turalist view o'f th'e world and 'there is notreally very much evidence to support it. Oc-casionally good 'termsof trade, in the caseof Japanese silk in the latter part of thenineteenth century or Swedish timber in thesame period, have 'contri'butedo the morerapid development of a society. On 'the

whole, however, terms of trade for any oneparty tend to rise and fall with the shiftingcargo of world industry. It cannot be reliedon for any evolutionary process that leadsouitof poverty.Increased productivity is really the onlymethod by which a society can go on gettingricher for a considerableperiod of time. The'differential development' thesis Ithat inter-nal cultures are far more important in de-termining Ithe movement of a society awayfrom poverty Itowvard iches than any ex-ternal relationship, including terms of trade,is supported by the fact that some societieswhich previously were mainly raw materialssuppliers did quite well out of this and gotrich, while others similarly placed havestayed poor. Australia, New Zealand, Ca-nada, the UniltedStates, and Sweden are ex-amples of the former; Argentina, Uruguayand Chile are examples of the laltter. Thewhole cen'ter-periphery argument disinte-grates in the light of evolutionary dynamics.Peripheries become centers, centers becomeperipheries, and there is very li'ttle evidencethat centers have any permanent power oreven much redis'tributivepower of any kind.The empires were a drain on the imperialcountriesand 'hindered he'irdevelopment.So far in 'this discussion we have barelymentioned the word peace, which is a re-flecti'on of the fact perhaps that Galtung'sthought is a very large-scale system of whichhi's work on peace and conflict is only apart, although a very 'importantpart, andthe pait perhaps which motivated the whole.He has, however, made one important con-tribution to the general theory of conflict.This is the distinction which he m'akesbe-tween associative solutions to conflict situa-ti'ons and dissociative solutions. Asso'ciativesolutions involve some kind of agreement,some merging of identity of the conflictingparties, perhaps some superordinate struc-ture or organization so that the 'conflict ismerged, as i't were, in 'the larger general will.Dissociative solutions 'are those which in-volve property or boundaries, good fencesmaking go'od neighbors, keeping people


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Twelve Friendly Quarrels 83away from each other, and so on. Galtungdoes not reject the dissociative solutions inprinciple, but he clearly has a very strongprejudice in favor of the associative solu-tions. This is perhaps a little inconsistentwith some of his other positions, as associa-tive solutions to conflict tend to involvehierarchy, dominance, inequality, and a greatmany otherthingswhich he does not like.The contradiction here though real ismeaningful. One suspects that it comes outof the basic biblical background in Galt-ung's Norwegian heritage, even though heis a professed agnostic. The idea of a worldin which everybody is equal and everybodyloves everybody is a vision of biblical reli-gion which for all its difficulties of attain-ment has had a profound effect on thedreams of the human future. But in Galt-ung's case it does raise obstacles to perceiv-ing the problem of the optimum mixture ofthe associative and dissociative elements inconflict resolution and indeed in the larg-er framework of human betterment. This,again, carriesus back to the role of property,which I think Galtung has never adequatelyanalyzed. Property is created by a socialcontract, that 'is, by an associative act orstructure.It works, however, by creating dis-sociative solutions to problems of conflict inthe form of agreed fences and boundaries.By so doing it takes the 'burden off thefurther implementation of associative solu-tions. Property, whether in land, capital ornational boundaries, is perhaps the easiestthing to agree about and once we haveagreed about it we don't have to agree aboutmuch else, for we each have liberty withinthe boundaries of our property. As agree-ment is a fantastically scarce commoditywith a very high potential cost, economizingit seems like a good thing. I would, there-fore, give a much higher ethical value to thedissociative solutions than Galtung does, al-though the problem of the right mix is avery difficult one which we are a long wayfrom having solved.

Finally, we come to the great Galtungmetaphors of 'structuralviolence' 'and 'posi-

tive peace'. They are metaphors rather thanmodels, and for that very reason are suspect.Metaphors always imply models and meta-phors have much more persuasive powerthan models do, for models tend to be thepreserve of the specialist. But when a meta-phor implies a bad model it can be verydangerous, for it is both persuasive andwrong. The metaphor of structural violenceI would argue falls right into this category.The metaphor is that poverty, deprivation,ill health, low expectations of life, a condi-tion in which more than half the human racelives, is 'like' a thug beating up the victimand 'takinghis money away from him in thestreet, or it is 'like' a conquerorstealing theland of the people and reducing them toslavery. The implication is that poverty andits associated ills are the fault of the thugor the conqueror and the solution is to doaway with thugs and conquerors.While thereis some truth in the metaphor, in the modernworld at least there is not very much. Vio-lence, whether of the streets and the home,or of the guerilla, of the police, or of thearmed forces, is a very different phenome-non from poverty. The processeswhich createand sustain poverty are not at all like theprocesses which create and sustain violence,although like everything else in 'the world,everything is somewhat related to every-thing else.There is a very real problem of the struc-tures which lead to violence, but unfortu-nately Galitung'smetaphor of structuralvio-lence as he has used it has diverted atten-tion from this problem. Violence in the be-havioral sense, that is, somebody actuallydoing damage to somebody else and tryingto make them worse off, is a 'threshold'phenomenon, rather like the boiling over ofa pot. The temperatureunder a pot can risefor a long time without its boiling over, butat some 'threshold boiling over will takeplace. The study of the structureswhich un-derlie violence are a very important andmuch neglected part of peace research andindeed of social science in general. Thresh-old phenomena like violence are difficult to


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84 Kenneth E. Bouldingstudy because they represent 'breaks' in thesystenmrather than uniformities. Violence,whether between persons or organizations,occurs when the 'strain' on a system is toogreat for its 'strength'. The metaphor hereis that violence is like what happens whenwe break a piece of chalk. Strength andstrain, however, especially in social systems,are so interwoven historically that it is verydifficult to separatethem.The diminution of violence involves twopossible strategies, or a mixture of the two;one is Ithe ncrease in the strength of the sys-tem, 'the other is the diminution of the strain.The strength of systems involves habit, cul-ture, taboos, and sanctions, all these 'thingswhich enable a system to stand lincreasingstrain without breaking down into violence.The strains on the system 'are largely dy-namic in character, such as arms races, mu-tually stimulated hostility, changes in rela-tive economic position or political power,which are often hard to identify. Conflicts ofinterest 'areonly part 'ofthe strain on a sys-tem, and not always the most importantpart.It is very hard for people ito know their in-terests, and misperceptions of 'interest takeplace mainly through the dynamic processes,not through the structural ones. It is onlyperceptions of interest which affect people'sbehavior, not the 'real' interests, whateverthese may be, and the gap between percep-ti'on and reality can be very large and re-sistant to change.However, what Galitung calls structuralviolence (which has been defined 'byone un-kind commenltatoras anything that Galitungdoesn't like) was originally defined as anyunnecessarilylow expectation of life, on thatassumption that anybody who dies beforethe allotted span has been killed, howeverunintentionally and unknowingly, by some-body else. The concept has been expandedto include all 'theproblems of poverty, desti-tution, deprivation, and misery. These areenormouslyreal and are a very high priorityfor research and action, but they belong tosystems which are only peripherally relatedto 'the structures whi'ch produce violence.

This is not rtosay that the cultures of vio-lence and the cultures of poverty are notsometimes related, though not all povertycultures are cultures of violence, and cer-tainly not all cultures of violence are pover-ty cultures.But the dynamicslof poverty andthe success or failure to rise out of it are ofa complexity far beyond anything which themetaphor of structural violence can offer.While the metaphor of structural violenceperformed a service in calling attention toa problem, it may have d'onea disservice inpreventing us fromfinding the answer.With all the richness and imaginativeoriginality of these essays one feels thatsomething fundamental is missing. This issomething which Malthus perceived as earlyas 1798, which Lewis Richardson perceivedin his theory of arms races, which AnatolRapoport perceived in hi'sstudy of the pris-oner's dilemma, and which Garrett Hardinperceived in the tragedy of the commons -that there are in society perverse dynamicprocesses by whiich social systems go frombad (toworse rather than from bad to 'better,in spilte of the great principle of decisionthat everybody does what he thinks is bestat the 'time.The analysis of these processesofperverse dynamics is the key to successfulintervention in human betterment. And in-tervention there must be. Things left merelyto themselves follow the law of entropy,that is, 'the law of 'the exhaustion of poten-tial, whether of thermodynamicpotential inequalizing 'temperatures,of biological po-tential in aging, or of social potential in thecorruption and decline of societies and or-ganizations. The generalized second lawsays all things go naturally from bad toworse unless there is re-creation of poten-tial. The understanding of how things gofrom 'bad to worse 'and how interventioncan reverse this involves models, not justmetaphors.This is the great business of whatI would call 'normativescience', and I sharewith Galtung the feeling that this is one ofthe most urgent'tasksof the humanrace.

The relation of normative science to peaceresearch is an important question, partly se-


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Twelve Friendly Quarrels 85mantic, but it has some substance. WhatGaltung has tried to do with the concepts ofstructural violence and positive peace hasbeen to expand Itheconcept of peace researchinto a general normative science. In prin-ciple this seems (to me a very important con-tribution and it could well be that one ofthe most important fruits of the peace re-search movement would be precisely to haveit expand into a general movement fornormative science, which would concern it-self not merely with peace and war, or evenwith violence, but with all the ills thatafflict the human race, and would involvean orderly way of thinking aibout thesethings in the hope of more successful nor-mative lintervention. So much harm is donewith the motivation of doing good thatit is clear that a good normative science isa very high priority. Within this, 'the studyof peace and war in the international sys-tem, and of the larger problem of personaland group violence, form important subsets.Other subsets would include medicine, crim-inology, psychiatry, family studies, religiousstudies, poverty studies, and so on, whichwould cover between them the whole fieldof the social systems and indeed beyond thisinto the biological and physical systemswhich so profoundly affect the fate of thehuman race.Ultimately, normative science would haveto 'include 'the study 'of the earth, or anyother human habitation, as a total systemfrom the point of view of human interven-tion for human betterment. Normative sci-ence does not have to produce a universalagreement as to the defini'tion of humanbetterment. The study of various images ofit will be part of its field. Galtung's mistakeit seems 'to me was to take the concept andtheoretical structures which were appropri-ate to part of normative science, namelypeace research, 'and try and apply these tothe whole, which cannot really 'be done.This is an error, however, which can easilybe corrected and it should not be allowed todetract from his major achievement, themagnitude of which perhaps he did not even

realize himself, of seeing that a normativescience was a serious humanendeavor.A further principle which the Galtung ex-perience suggests is the extraordinary diffi-culty of being really interdisciplinary. Partof the failures of the Galtung system ariseone suspects from the fact that he is pri-marily a sociologist and that he really doesnot understand Ithe contribution of econom-ics. As a good many economists do not seemto understand it ei'ther, this perhaps can beforgiven! As an intellectual Galtung dislikesbusiness and the commonplaceness of themarketplace, and the appareitly vulgar anddissociative character of commercial life.This leads him to underestimate the moralvalue of exchange as a social organizer, im-plying as it does equality of status, even asit may lead to inequality in wealth. Galt-ung's deep ambivalence towards socialismreflects perhaps an inability to choose be-tween what is perceived as the tyranny ofthe market and the tyranny of the state. Ifwe reject exchange and the property institu-tion on which it rests we are all too likely toget not love 'butthreat a'sa major organizingfactor of society, as the history of the com-munist states abundantly demonstrates.Hereagain, we come back to the need for a mixof 'the associative and dissoci'ativeelementsin social life 'if we are really 'to move frombad to 'better instead of from bad to worse.It seems almost indecent to write an ex-tended review of so importarita work with-out footnotes, bu!t I have deliberately triedto paint a broad canvas. There are enoughinconsistencies in every creative mind sothat it is easy to misinterpret ilt in detail. Iam sure in some point or other I have mis-interpreted what Galtung has to say and Iwould be most happy to be corrected.Furthermore,I have left out 'a large numberof important detail's - 'the discussion of dis-armament, for instance, the delightful pro-posals for turning the Catholic Church intoa gigantic Society of Friends, the empiricalstudies of public opinion and of the sub-culture of the United Nations' forces, andthe innumerable flashes of insight that oc-


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86 Kenneth E. Bouldingcur in every chapter. We must wait until all suade iltsreaders to study the volumes them-the volumes are published before a final selves, it will have accomplished a majorevaluation can be made and even then there purpose. It will only really be useful, how-will probably be as many evaluations as ever, if it can stimulate an ongoing dialogue.there are readers. If this review can per-

VISITING FELLOWSHIPSThe International Peace Research Institute, Oslo, each year grants a number ofvisiting fellowships to researchers or post-graduate students for stays at the Insti-tute. Fellowships are usually granted for 2-3 months, at a monthly rate ofN.Cr. 3,000-3,500 (approximately US $600). The main aim of the fellowship pro-gram is Itoencourage cooperation between researchersand institutes with commoninterests in peace research.Preference is given to applicants from the Third Worldand from countrieswith non-convertiblecurrencies.Travel costs are not covered.Applications for the second half of 1977, and spring 1978, should be received by15 April, 1977. We do not use an application form, but we would like to have in-formation on academic and practical background,with a list of publications, andin particular data on current research interests and plans for the stay in Norway.Applicationsshouldbe sent toThe Director,InternationalPeace ResearchInstitute,Raadhusgaten4, N-Oslo 1, NORWAYwho can also give furtherinformationon the Instituteand its activities.

1977 Building - Galtung

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