essay on peace

Essay on Peace

500 words essay peace.

Peace is the path we take for bringing growth and prosperity to society. If we do not have peace and harmony, achieving political strength, economic stability and cultural growth will be impossible. Moreover, before we transmit the notion of peace to others, it is vital for us to possess peace within. It is not a certain individual’s responsibility to maintain peace but everyone’s duty. Thus, an essay on peace will throw some light on the same topic.

Importance of Peace

History has been proof of the thousands of war which have taken place in all periods at different levels between nations. Thus, we learned that peace played an important role in ending these wars or even preventing some of them.

In fact, if you take a look at all religious scriptures and ceremonies, you will realize that all of them teach peace. They mostly advocate eliminating war and maintaining harmony. In other words, all of them hold out a sacred commitment to peace.

It is after the thousands of destructive wars that humans realized the importance of peace. Earth needs peace in order to survive. This applies to every angle including wars, pollution , natural disasters and more.

When peace and harmony are maintained, things will continue to run smoothly without any delay. Moreover, it can be a saviour for many who do not wish to engage in any disrupting activities or more.

In other words, while war destroys and disrupts, peace builds and strengthens as well as restores. Moreover, peace is personal which helps us achieve security and tranquillity and avoid anxiety and chaos to make our lives better.

How to Maintain Peace

There are many ways in which we can maintain peace at different levels. To begin with humankind, it is essential to maintain equality, security and justice to maintain the political order of any nation.

Further, we must promote the advancement of technology and science which will ultimately benefit all of humankind and maintain the welfare of people. In addition, introducing a global economic system will help eliminate divergence, mistrust and regional imbalance.

It is also essential to encourage ethics that promote ecological prosperity and incorporate solutions to resolve the environmental crisis. This will in turn share success and fulfil the responsibility of individuals to end historical prejudices.

Similarly, we must also adopt a mental and spiritual ideology that embodies a helpful attitude to spread harmony. We must also recognize diversity and integration for expressing emotion to enhance our friendship with everyone from different cultures.

Finally, it must be everyone’s noble mission to promote peace by expressing its contribution to the long-lasting well-being factor of everyone’s lives. Thus, we must all try our level best to maintain peace and harmony.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Conclusion of the Essay on Peace

To sum it up, peace is essential to control the evils which damage our society. It is obvious that we will keep facing crises on many levels but we can manage them better with the help of peace. Moreover, peace is vital for humankind to survive and strive for a better future.

FAQ of Essay on Peace

Question 1: What is the importance of peace?

Answer 1: Peace is the way that helps us prevent inequity and violence. It is no less than a golden ticket to enter a new and bright future for mankind. Moreover, everyone plays an essential role in this so that everybody can get a more equal and peaceful world.

Question 2: What exactly is peace?

Answer 2: Peace is a concept of societal friendship and harmony in which there is no hostility and violence. In social terms, we use it commonly to refer to a lack of conflict, such as war. Thus, it is freedom from fear of violence between individuals or groups.

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December 2, 2021

Peace Is More Than War’s Absence, and New Research Explains How to Build It

A new project measures ways to promote positive social relations among groups

By Peter T. Coleman , Allegra Chen-Carrel & Vincent Hans Michael Stueber

PeopleImages/Getty Images

Today, the misery of war is all too striking in places such as Syria, Yemen, Tigray, Myanmar and Ukraine. It can come as a surprise to learn that there are scores of sustainably peaceful societies around the world, ranging from indigenous people in the Xingu River Basin in Brazil to countries in the European Union. Learning from these societies, and identifying key drivers of harmony, is a vital process that can help promote world peace.

Unfortunately, our current ability to find these peaceful mechanisms is woefully inadequate. The Global Peace Index (GPI) and its complement the Positive Peace Index (PPI) rank 163 nations annually and are currently the leading measures of peacefulness. The GPI, launched in 2007 by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), was designed to measure negative peace , or the absence of violence, destructive conflict, and war. But peace is more than not fighting. The PPI, launched in 2009, was supposed to recognize this and track positive peace , or the promotion of peacefulness through positive interactions like civility, cooperation and care.

Yet the PPI still has many serious drawbacks. To begin with, it continues to emphasize negative peace, despite its name. The components of the PPI were selected and are weighted based on existing national indicators that showed the “strongest correlation with the GPI,” suggesting they are in effect mostly an extension of the GPI. For example, the PPI currently includes measures of factors such as group grievances, dissemination of false information, hostility to foreigners, and bribes.

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The index also lacks an empirical understanding of positive peace. The PPI report claims that it focuses on “positive aspects that create the conditions for a society to flourish.” However, there is little indication of how these aspects were derived (other than their relationships with the GPI). For example, access to the internet is currently a heavily weighted indicator in the PPI. But peace existed long before the internet, so is the number of people who can go online really a valid measure of harmony?

The PPI has a strong probusiness bias, too. Its 2021 report posits that positive peace “is a cross-cutting facilitator of progress, making it easier for businesses to sell.” A prior analysis of the PPI found that almost half the indicators were directly related to the idea of a “Peace Industry,” with less of a focus on factors found to be central to positive peace such as gender inclusiveness, equity and harmony between identity groups.

A big problem is that the index is limited to a top-down, national-level approach. The PPI’s reliance on national-level metrics masks critical differences in community-level peacefulness within nations, and these provide a much more nuanced picture of societal peace . Aggregating peace data at the national level, such as focusing on overall levels of inequality rather than on disparities along specific group divides, can hide negative repercussions of the status quo for minority communities.

To fix these deficiencies, we and our colleagues have been developing an alternative approach under the umbrella of the Sustaining Peace Project . Our effort has various components , and these can provide a way to solve the problems in the current indices. Here are some of the elements:

Evidence-based factors that measure positive and negative peace. The peace project began with a comprehensive review of the empirical studies on peaceful societies, which resulted in identifying 72 variables associated with sustaining peace. Next, we conducted an analysis of ethnographic and case study data comparing “peace systems,” or clusters of societies that maintain peace with one another, with nonpeace systems. This allowed us to identify and measure a set of eight core drivers of peace. These include the prevalence of an overarching social identity among neighboring groups and societies; their interconnections such as through trade or intermarriage; the degree to which they are interdependent upon one another in terms of ecological, economic or security concerns; the extent to which their norms and core values support peace or war; the role that rituals, symbols and ceremonies play in either uniting or dividing societies; the degree to which superordinate institutions exist that span neighboring communities; whether intergroup mechanisms for conflict management and resolution exist; and the presence of political leadership for peace versus war.

A core theory of sustaining peace . We have also worked with a broad group of peace, conflict and sustainability scholars to conceptualize how these many variables operate as a complex system by mapping their relationships in a causal loop diagram and then mathematically modeling their core dynamics This has allowed us to gain a comprehensive understanding of how different constellations of factors can combine to affect the probabilities of sustaining peace.

Bottom-up and top-down assessments . Currently, the Sustaining Peace Project is applying techniques such as natural language processing and machine learning to study markers of peace and conflict speech in the news media. Our preliminary research suggests that linguistic features may be able to distinguish between more and less peaceful societies. These methods offer the potential for new metrics that can be used for more granular analyses than national surveys.

We have also been working with local researchers from peaceful societies to conduct interviews and focus groups to better understand the in situ dynamics they believe contribute to sustaining peace in their communities. For example in Mauritius , a highly multiethnic society that is today one of the most peaceful nations in Africa, we learned of the particular importance of factors like formally addressing legacies of slavery and indentured servitude, taboos against proselytizing outsiders about one’s religion, and conscious efforts by journalists to avoid divisive and inflammatory language in their reporting.

Today, global indices drive funding and program decisions that impact countless lives, making it critical to accurately measure what contributes to socially just, safe and thriving societies. These indices are widely reported in news outlets around the globe, and heads of state often reference them for their own purposes. For example, in 2017 , Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, though he and his country were mired in corruption allegations, referenced his country’s positive increase on the GPI by stating, “Receiving such high praise from an institute that once named this country the most violent in the world is extremely significant.” Although a 2019 report on funding for peace-related projects shows an encouraging shift towards supporting positive peace and building resilient societies, many of these projects are really more about preventing harm, such as grants for bolstering national security and enhancing the rule of law.

The Sustaining Peace Project, in contrast, includes metrics for both positive and negative peace, is enhanced by local community expertise, and is conceptually coherent and based on empirical findings. It encourages policy makers and researchers to refocus attention and resources on initiatives that actually promote harmony, social health and positive reciprocity between groups. It moves away from indices that rank entire countries and instead focuses on identifying factors that, through their interaction, bolster or reduce the likelihood of sustaining peace. It is a holistic perspective.  

Tracking peacefulness across the globe is a highly challenging endeavor. But there is great potential in cooperation between peaceful communities, researchers and policy makers to produce better methods and metrics. Measuring peace is simply too important to get only half-right. 

World Peace Essay: Prompts, How-to Guide, & 200+ Topics

Throughout history, people have dreamed of a world without violence, where harmony and justice reign. This dream of world peace has inspired poets, philosophers, and politicians for centuries. But is it possible to achieve peace globally? Writing a world peace essay will help you find the answer to this question and learn more about the topic.

Our specialists will write a custom essay specially for you!

In this article, our custom writing team will discuss how to write an essay on world peace quickly and effectively. To inspire you even more, we have prepared writing prompts and topics that can come in handy.

• ✍️ Writing Guide
• 🦄 Essay Prompts
• ✔️ World Peace Topics
• 🌎 Pacifism Topics
• ✌️ Catchy Essay Titles
• 🕊️ Research Topics on Peace
• 💡 War and Peace Topics
• ☮️ Peace Title Ideas
• 🌐 Peace Language Topics

🔗 References

✍️ how to achieve world peace essay writing guide.

Stuck with your essay about peace? Here is a step-by-step writing guide with many valuable tips to make your paper well-structured and compelling.

1. Research the Topic

The first step in writing your essay on peace is conducting research. You can look for relevant sources in your university library, encyclopedias, dictionaries, book catalogs, periodical databases, and Internet search engines. Besides, you can use your lecture notes and textbooks for additional information.

Among the variety of sources that could be helpful for a world peace essay, we would especially recommend checking the Global Peace Index report . It presents the most comprehensive data-driven analysis of current trends in world peace. It’s a credible report by the Institute for Economics and Peace, so you can cite it as a source in your aper.

Here are some other helpful resources where you can find information for your world peace essay:

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• United Nations Peacekeeping
• International Peace Institute
• United States Institute of Peace
• European Union Institute for Security Studies
• Stockholm International Peace Research Institute

2. Create an Outline

Outlining is an essential aspect of the essay writing process. It helps you plan how you will connect all the facts to support your thesis statement.

To write an outline for your essay about peace, follow these steps:

• Determine your topic and develop a thesis statement .
• Choose the main points that will support your thesis and will be covered in your paper.
• Organize your ideas in a logical order.
• Think about transitions between paragraphs.

Here is an outline example for a “How to Achieve World Peace” essay. Check it out to get a better idea of how to structure your paper.

• Definition of world peace.
• The importance of global peace.
• Thesis statement: World peace is attainable through combined efforts on individual, societal, and global levels.
• Practive of non-violent communication.
• Development of healthy relationships.
• Promotion of conflict resolution skills.
• Promotion of democracy and human rights.
• Support of peacebuilding initiatives.
• Protection of cultural diversity.
• Encouragement of arms control and non-proliferation.
• Promotion of international law and treaties.
• Support of intercultural dialogue and understanding.
• Restated thesis.
• Call to action.

You can also use our free essay outline generator to structure your world peace essay.

3. Write Your World Peace Essay

Now, it’s time to use your outline to write an A+ paper. Here’s how to do it:

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• Start with the introductory paragraph , which states the topic, presents a thesis, and provides a roadmap for your essay. If you need some assistance with this part, try our free introduc tion generator.
• Your essay’s main body should contain at least 3 paragraphs. Each of them should provide explanations and evidence to develop your argument.
• Finally, in your conclusion , you need to restate your thesis and summarize the points you’ve covered in the paper. It’s also a good idea to add a closing sentence reflecting on your topic’s significance or encouraging your audience to take action. Feel free to use our essay conclusion generator to develop a strong ending for your paper.

4. Revise and Proofread

Proofreading is a way to ensure your essay has no typos and grammar mistakes. Here are practical tips for revising your work:

• Take some time. Leaving your essay for a day or two before revision will give you a chance to look at it from another angle.
• Read out loud. To catch run-on sentences or unclear ideas in your writing, read it slowly and out loud. You can also use our Read My Essay to Me tool.
• Make a checklist . Create a list for proofreading to ensure you do not miss any important details, including structure, punctuation, capitalization, and formatting.
• Ask someone for feedback. It is always a good idea to ask your professor, classmate, or friend to read your essay and give you constructive criticism on the work.
• Note down the mistakes you usually make. By identifying your weaknesses, you can work on them to become a more confident writer.

🦄 World Peace Essay Writing Prompts

Looking for an interesting idea for your world peace essay? Look no further! Use our writing prompts to get a dose of inspiration.

How to Promote Peace in the Community Essay Prompt

Promoting peace in the world always starts in small communities. If people fight toxic narratives, negative stereotypes, and hate crimes, they will build a strong and united community and set a positive example for others.

In your essay on how to promote peace in the community, you can dwell on the following ideas:

• Explain the importance of accepting different opinions in establishing peace in your area.
• Analyze how fighting extremism in all its forms can unite the community and create a peaceful environment.
• Clarify what peace means in the context of your community and what factors contribute to or hinder it.
• Investigate the role of dialogue in resolving conflicts and building mutual understanding in the community.

How to Promote Peace as a Student Essay Prompt

Students, as an active part of society, can play a crucial role in promoting peace at various levels. From educational entities to worldwide conferences, they have an opportunity to introduce the idea of peace for different groups of people.

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Check out the following fresh ideas for your essay on how to promote peace as a student:

• Analyze how information campaigns organized by students can raise awareness of peace-related issues.
• Discuss the impact of education in fostering a culture of peace.
• Explore how students can use social media to advocate for a peaceful world.
• Describe your own experience of taking part in peace-promoting campaigns or programs.

How Can We Maintain Peace in Our Society Essay Prompt

Maintaining peace in society is a difficult but achievable task that requires constant attention and effort from all members of society.

We have prepared ideas that can come in handy when writing an essay about how we can maintain peace in our society:

• Investigate the role of tolerance, understanding of different cultures, and respect for religions in promoting peace in society.
• Analyze the importance of peacekeeping organizations.
• Provide real-life examples of how people promote peace.
• Offer practical suggestions for how individuals and communities can work together to maintain peace.

Youth Creating a Peaceful Future Essay Prompt

Young people are the future of any country, as well as the driving force to create a more peaceful world. Their energy and motivation can aid in finding new methods of coping with global hate and violence.

In your essay, you can use the following ideas to show the role of youth in creating a peaceful world:

• Analyze the key benefits of youth involvement in peacekeeping.
• Explain why young people are leading tomorrow’s change today.
• Identify the main ingredients for building a peaceful generation with the help of young people’s initiatives.
• Investigate how adolescent girls can be significant agents of positive change in their communities.

Is World Peace Possible Essay Prompt

Whether or not the world can be a peaceful place is one of the most controversial topics. While most people who hear the question “Is a world without war possible?” will probably answer “no,” others still believe in the goodness of humanity.

To discuss in your essay if world peace is possible, use the following ideas:

• Explain how trade, communication, and technology can promote cooperation and the peaceful resolution of conflicts.
• Analyze the role of international organizations like the United Nations and the European Union in maintaining peace in the world.
• Investigate how economic inequality poses a severe threat to peace and safety.
• Dwell on the key individual and national interests that can lead to conflict and competition between countries.

✔️ World Peace Topics for Essays

To help get you started with writing, here’s a list of 200 topics you can use for your future essTo help get you started with writing a world peace essay, we’ve prepared a list of topics you can use:

• Defining peace
• Why peace is better: benefits of living in harmony
• Is world peace attainable? Theory and historical examples
• Sustainable peace: is peace an intermission of war?
• Peaceful coexistence : how a society can do without wars
• Peaceful harmony or war of all against all: what came first?
• The relationship between economic development and peace
• Peace and Human Nature: Can Humans Live without Conflicts ?
• Prerequisites for peace : what nations need to refrain from war?
• Peace as an unnatural phenomenon: why people tend to start a war?
• Peace as a natural phenomenon: why people avoid starting a war?
• Is peace the end of the war or its beginning?
• Hybrid war and hybrid peace
• What constitutes peace in the modern world
• Does two countries’ not attacking each other constitute peace?
• “Cold peace” in the international relations today
• What world religions say about world peace
• Defining peacemaking
• Internationally recognized symbols of peace
• World peace: a dream or a goal?

🌎 Peace Essay Topics on Pacifism

• History of pacifism: how the movement started and developed
• Role of the pacifist movement in the twentieth-century history
• Basic philosophical principles of pacifism
• Pacifism as philosophy and as a movement
• The peace sign: what it means
• How the pacifist movement began: actual causes
• The anti-war movements : what did the activists want?
• The relationship between pacifism and the sexual revolution
• Early pacifism: examples from ancient times
• Is pacifism a religion?
• Should pacifists refrain from any kinds of violence?
• Is the pacifist movement a threat to the national security?
• Can a pacifist work in law enforcement authorities?
• Pacifism and non-violence: comparing and contrasting
• The pacifist perspective on the concept of self-defense
• Pacifism in art: examples of pacifistic works of art
• Should everyone be a pacifist?
• Pacifism and diet: should every pacifist be a vegetarian ?
• How pacifists respond to oppression
• The benefits of an active pacifist movement for a country

✌️ Interesting Essay Titles about Peace

• Can the country that won a war occupy the one that lost?
• The essential peace treaties in history
• Should a country that lost a war pay reparations ?
• Peace treaties that caused new, more violent wars
• Can an aggressor country be deprived of the right to have an army after losing a war?
• Non-aggression pacts do not prevent wars
• All the countries should sign non-aggression pacts with one another
• Peace and truces: differences and similarities
• Do countries pursue world peace when signing peace treaties?
• The treaty of Versailles : positive and negative outcomes
• Ceasefires and surrenders: the world peace perspective
• When can a country break a peace treaty?
• Dealing with refugees and prisoners of war under peace treaties
• Who should resolve international conflicts?
• The role of the United Nations in enforcing peace treaties
• Truce envoys’ immunities
• What does a country do after surrendering unconditionally?
• A separate peace: the ethical perspective
• Can a peace treaty be signed in modern-day hybrid wars?
• Conditions that are unacceptable in a peace treaty

🕊️ Research Topics on Peace and Conflict Resolution

• Can people be forced to stop fighting?
• Successful examples of peace restoration through the use of force
• Failed attempts to restore peace with legitimate violence
• Conflict resolution vs conflict transformation
• What powers peacemakers should not have
• Preemptive peacemaking: can violence be used to prevent more abuse?
• The status of peacemakers in the international law
• Peacemaking techniques: Gandhi’s strategies
• How third parties can reconcile belligerents
• The role of the pacifist movement in peacemaking
• The war on wars: appropriate and inappropriate approaches to peacemaking
• Mistakes that peacemakers often stumble upon
• The extent of peacemaking : when the peacemakers’ job is done
• Making peace and sustaining it: how peacemakers prevent future conflicts
• The origins of peacemaking
• What to do if peacemaking does not work
• Staying out: can peacemaking make things worse?
• A personal reflection on the effectiveness of peacemaking
• Prospects of peacemaking
• Personal experience of peacemaking

💡 War and Peace Essay Topics

• Counties should stop producing new types of firearms
• Countries should not stop producing new types of weapons
• Mutual assured destruction as a means of sustaining peace
• The role of nuclear disarmament in world peace
• The nuclear war scenario: what will happen to the world?
• Does military intelligence contribute to sustaining peace?
• Collateral damage: analyzing the term
• Can the defenders of peace take up arms?
• For an armed person, is killing another armed person radically different from killing an unarmed one? Ethical and legal perspectives
• Should a healthy country have a strong army?
• Firearms should be banned
• Every citizen has the right to carry firearms
• The correlation between gun control and violence rates
• The second amendment: modern analysis
• Guns do not kill: people do
• What weapons a civilian should never be able to buy
• Biological and chemical weapons
• Words as a weapon: rhetoric wars
• Can a pacifist ever use a weapon?
• Can dropping weapons stop the war?

☮️ Peace Title Ideas for Essays

• How the nuclear disarmament emblem became the peace sign
• The symbolism of a dove with an olive branch
• Native Americans’ traditions of peace declaration
• The mushroom cloud as a cultural symbol
• What the world peace awareness ribbon should look like
• What I would like to be the international peace sign
• The history of the International Day of Peace
• The peace sign as an accessory
• The most famous peace demonstrations
• Hippies’ contributions to the peace symbolism
• Anti-war and anti-military symbols
• How to express pacifism as a political position
• The rainbow as a symbol of peace
• Can a white flag be considered a symbol of peace?
• Examples of the inappropriate use of the peace sign
• The historical connection between the peace sign and the cannabis leaf sign
• Peace symbols in different cultures
• Gods of war and gods of peace: examples from the ancient mythology
• Peace sign tattoo: pros and cons
• Should the peace sign be placed on a national flag?

🌐 Essay Topics about Peace Language

• The origin and historical context of the word “peace”
• What words foreign languages use to denote “peace”
• What words, if any, should a pacifist avoid?
• The pacifist discourse: key themes
• Disintegration language: “us” vs “them”
• How to combat war propaganda
• Does political correctness promote world peace?
• Can an advocate of peace be harsh in his or her speeches?
• Effective persuasive techniques in peace communications and negotiations
• Analyzing the term “world peace”
• If the word “war” is forbidden, will wars stop?
• Is “peacemaking” a right term?
• Talk to the hand: effective and ineffective interpersonal communication techniques that prevent conflicts
• The many meanings of the word “peace”
• The pacifists’ language: when pacifists swear, yell, or insult
• Stressing similarities instead of differences as a tool of peace language
• The portrayal of pacifists in movies
• The portrayals of pacifists in fiction
• Pacifist lyrics: examples from the s’ music
• Poems that supported peace The power of the written word
• peaceful coexistence: theory and practice
• Under what conditions can humans coexist peacefully?
• “A man is a wolf to another man”: the modern perspective
• What factors prevent people from committing a crime?
• Right for peace vs need for peace
• Does the toughening of punishment reduce crime?
• The Stanford prison experiment: implications
• Is killing natural?
• The possibility of universal love: does disliking always lead to conflicts?
• Basic income and the dynamics of thefts
• Hobbesian Leviathan as the guarantee of peace
• Is state-concentrated legitimate violence an instrument for reducing violence overall?
• Factors that undermine peaceful coexistence
• Living in peace vs living for peace
• The relationship between otherness and peacefulness
• World peace and human nature: the issue of attainability
• The most successful examples of peaceful coexistence
• Lack of peace as lack of communication
• Point made: counterculture and pacifism
• What Woodstock proved to world peace nonbelievers and opponents?
• Woodstock and peaceful coexistence: challenges and successes
• peace, economics, and quality of life
• Are counties living in peace wealthier? Statistics and reasons
• Profits of peace and profits of war: comparison of benefits and losses
• Can a war improve the economy ? Discussing examples
• What is more important for people: having appropriate living conditions or winning a war?
• How wars can improve national economies: the perspective of aggressors and defenders
• Peace obstructers: examples of interest groups that sustained wars and prevented peace
• Can democracies be at war with one another?
• Does the democratic rule in a country provide it with an advantage at war?
• Why wars destroy economies: examples, discussion, and counterarguments
• How world peace would improve everyone’s quality of life
• peace and war today
• Are we getting closer to world peace? Violence rates, values change, and historical comparison
• The peaceful tomorrow: how conflicts will be resolved in the future if there are no wars
• Redefining war: what specific characteristics today’s wars have that make them different from previous centuries’ wars
• Why wars start today: comparing and contrasting the reasons for wars in the modern world to historical examples
• Subtle wars: how two countries can be at war with each other without having their armies collide in the battlefield
• Cyber peace: how cyberwars can be stopped
• Information as a weapon: how information today lands harder blows than bombs and missiles
• Information wars: how the abundance of information and public access to it have not, nonetheless, eliminated propaganda
• Peace through defeating: how ISIS is different from other states, and how can its violence be stopped
• Is world peace a popular idea? Do modern people mostly want peace or mainly wish to fight against other people and win?
• Personal contributions to world peace
• What can I do for attaining world peace? Personal reflection
• Respect as a means of attaining peace: why respecting people is essential not only on the level of interpersonal communications but also on the level of social good
• Peacefulness as an attitude: how one’s worldview can prevent conflicts
• Why a person engages in insulting and offending : analysis of psychological causes and a personal perspective
• A smile as an agent of peace: how simple smiling to people around you contributes to peacefulness
• Appreciating otherness: how one can learn to value diversity and avoid xenophobia
• Peace and love: how the two are inherently interconnected in everyone’s life
• A micro-level peacemaker: my experiences of resolving conflicts and bringing peace
• Forgiveness for the sake of peace: does forgiving other people contribute to peaceful coexistence or promote further conflicts?
• Noble lies: is it acceptable for a person to lie to avoid conflicts and preserve peace?
• What should a victim do? Violent and non-violent responses to violence
• Standing up for the weak : is it always right to take the side of the weakest?
• Self-defense , overwhelming emotions, and witnessing horrible violence: could I ever shoot another person?
• Are there “fair” wars, and should every war be opposed?
• Protecting peace: could I take up arms to prevent a devastating war?
• Reporting violence: would I participate in sending a criminal to prison?
• The acceptability of violence against perpetrators : personal opinion
• Nonviolent individual resistance to injustice
• Peace is worth it: why I think wars are never justified
• How I sustain peace in my everyday life

Learn more on this topic:

• If I Could Change the World Essay: Examples and Writing Guide
• Ending the Essay: Conclusions
• Choosing and Narrowing a Topic to Write About
• Introduction to Research
• How the U.S. Can Help Humanity Achieve World Peace
• Ten Steps to World Peace
• How World Peace is Possible
• World Peace Books and Articles
• World Peace and Nonviolence
• The Leader of World Peace Essay
• UNO and World Peace Essay
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A very, very good paragraph. thanks

Glad you liked it! Thank you for your feedback!

Peace and conflict studies actually is good field because is dealing on how to manage the conflict among the two state or country.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts, Chieng!

Keep it up. Our world earnestly needs peace

I agree with you, Atibar 🙂

A very, very good paragraph.

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Essay Samples on Peace

Phenomenon of peace in the world.

Everyone in this world seeks peace. But what is Peace? Peace “is when people can resolve their conflicts without violence and can work together to improve the quality of their lives”.We are all fighting a war amongst ourselves to achieve utmost peace, and to win...

The Significance And Outcomes Of The First Hague Peace Conference

In order to understand and summarise the significance of The First Hague Peace conference, it is imperative to locate it not only within the twentieth-century, but as a derivative of nineteenth-century political events. One segment of World War 1 historians who focused on diplomacy either...

• Disarmament
• Nuclear Weapon

Comparison Of Jimmy Carter And Elie Wiesel Achievements In The Fight For Peace

Former President Jimmy Carter and Holocaust survivor Elie Weisel are both notable and knowledgeable men, who, through experience have their different ideations of how to achieve peace during a time where war seems inevitable. Carter’s, Just War or a Just War and Wiesel’s, Peace isn’t...

• Elie Wiesel
• Jimmy Carter

Search for Peace in the Just War Theory

In the article, “Does Peace Have a Chance?” that was printed by Slate on August 4, 2009, the author, John Horgan, evaluates the notion whether the actions and behaviour of mankind leads to antagonism and enmity which is the main cause of war and assesses...

• Just War Theory

Comparison of the Subject of Peace in Christianity and Islam

“There exist three forms of peace: interior peace, by which man is at peace with himself; the peace whereby man is at peace with God, submitting himself fully to God's dispositions; and the peace relative to one's neighbor, by which we live in peace with...

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The Definiton of Peace in Religion and Overall

Everyone in this world seeks peace. But what is Peace? Peace “is when people are able to resolve their conflicts without violence and can work together to improve the quality of their lives». We are all fighting a war amongst ourselves to achieve utmost peace,...

• Religious Beliefs

The Implementation of Peace with Peace Enforcement

Peace enforcement involves the application of a range of coercive measures, including the use of military force. It requires the explicit authorization of the Security Council. It is used to restore international peace and security in situations where the Security Council has decided to act...

• American Government
• Social Security

Extinction of Peace and Constant Presence of Conflict

Peace and conflict have always been joined at the hip since the beginning of mankind. The first peaceful era of human beings can be traced to Adam and Eve, and their stay at the garden of Eden. However, peace cannot go on unchecked for long....

Ways To Be Happy & To Live A Peaceful Life

Life is not all about having a lot of money. It doesn’t obligate you to always give. Or something that will always come out from you. Sometimes it is better to be silent. And in our life there will be a point that we will...

The Role Of Ethics In Peace And Conflict Research

The devastating violent conflicts experienced in Africa have raised numerous questions about their nature, causes, participants and ways to amicably end their intractableness. Other questions that require satisfactorily answers include why conflict actors like the political leaders, militias, extremists and suicide bombers, pirates, child soldiers,...

• Conflict Management

Best topics on Peace

1. Phenomenon Of Peace In The World

2. The Significance And Outcomes Of The First Hague Peace Conference

3. Comparison Of Jimmy Carter And Elie Wiesel Achievements In The Fight For Peace

4. Search for Peace in the Just War Theory

5. Comparison of the Subject of Peace in Christianity and Islam

6. The Definiton of Peace in Religion and Overall

7. The Implementation of Peace with Peace Enforcement

8. Extinction of Peace and Constant Presence of Conflict

9. Ways To Be Happy & To Live A Peaceful Life

10. The Role Of Ethics In Peace And Conflict Research

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Peace: Definition and Philosophic Meaning Essay

Peace is the absence of agitation or any form of disturbances leading to a state of serenity within an environment or in a person. The calmness and serenity that lead to an individual sense of peace are known as inner peace. To a nation, it is the normal state of harmony without incidence of hostility, violent crimes, or conflicts.

Inner peace is achieved when there is no conflict within the three most important aspects of a person, that is the body, mind, and soul. The feeling of inner peace does not depend on any external forces, the place we are in, the time, the current situation, the environment surrounding us, or the attitude of the people we are associating with at a particular moment. One can experience inner peace amid a hostile environment brought about by the negative attitude of people, war, and/or sickness. A person who has inner peace experiences justice, inner life balance, restfulness, resolution, freedom, harmony, and contentment. This inner peace should be strong enough to overcome anything that opposes it.

Peace is the cornerstone element that makes all other elements exist. Without peace in an area, a Nation, or the world, no development can take place. Political, economical, and cultural developments only take place when there is peace. On the other hand, development brings about peace. A good example is a scenario in poor countries in the world. Without economical, cultural, and political development, these nations are characterized by war and unending conflict. Modernization, economic funding, and political support from developed nations bring about peace in these nations. When there is proper health care, good governance, improved infrastructure, and the rule of law, the peace of a nation is realized. In turn, this national peace promotes inner personal peace.

The concept of peace

Peace is not an end to itself, but a way to peace. This concept has been used by many political activists in their quest to demand justice from the governing authority. There can never be peace in a person or Nation, without justice. Just as Martin Luther observed when he led the civil rights movement back in the 1960s, “true peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice” To promote world peace, various organizations across the globe have been established. The United Nations Peace Keeping Mission is mandated in peace promotion in nations where there is internal conflict. The Nobel Peace Prize was established to award individuals who promote and help achieve peace through ethical leadership.

Peace is the absence of conflict or violence, within a person or environment. Peace contributes to the development and is also achieved by development. Peace is not an end to itself but a way to achieving it. When justice is done, peace is achieved, in essence, peace exists everywhere, it is only because of limitations put by human beings that peace is not felt and realized. Inner and outer peace can be realized and expanded in everything that we do, as we learn to change our way of thinking.

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Lifestyle & Interests — Peace

Essays About Peace

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Agents of Peace: Roles and Experiences Across The Globe

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The Link Between Peace and Values of Life

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The Options to Achieve Peace with China

The paris peace accords: compromises to end the vietnam war harini venkata chalapathi, evaluation of peace in amish and paliyan’s communities, the relationship between globalization and peace, the vietnam war and the effectiveness of the peace movements, peace dynamics 2023-2024: insights, challenges, and strategies, strategies for peace: education and building sustainable future, ethical, technological, and societal considerations in the pursuit of peace, relevant topics.

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Essays on Peace

A good peace essay will define peace is often defined as a lack of disagreement, enmity or quarrel, absence of war or other hostilities, as a harmonious coexistence of people, countries, and nations. Peace essays note that peace as a feeling is often associated with tranquility and calmness. According to many essays, achieving peace is a goal for many people, especially those who live in regions of the world where there is war or other turmoil. Don't fail to mention in your essays on peace that one can also experience an internal lack of peace – it's a common concern in the modern world. Consult various peace essay samples below. We handpicked the best essay samples so you wouldn't need to sift through tons of information.

There have been claims that democratic states are more peaceful than autocratic states. This led to refinement of the democratic peace theory. It is believed that as much as the democratic states do fight with other countries, few cases have been reported of a Republican state fighting against another democratic...

Words: 1883

In geopolitics, the European region has been one of the most stable. For decades, countries in this region have maintained strong diplomatic ties with one another. Researchers have suggested, however, that one of the fundamental reasons of the First World War was the failure of diplomatic institutions to engage in...

Words: 1936

World peace is a key phenomenon and agenda that many leaders around the world are discussing. It is much more expensive to be at war than to be at peace, which is why many leaders advocate for peace. When World War II ended, many nations were left wondering what the...

Words: 1785

Every time people interact, conflicts are likely to arise. Even though disagreements will inevitably arise, it is important to find a solution to keep the peace and make sure everyone is able to coexist peacefully. A approach for finding better ways to handle a situation or a relationship is problem resolution....

The Two-Party Structure in the United States The two-party structure in the United States has resulted in two major parties that control the legislature. Though other minor parties exist, the Republican and Democratic parties in the United States have both of the advantages needed to promote the public's rights (Berg, John...

Introduction As one of the world's leading economists today, Joseph E. Stiglitz's perspective on a number of subjects can never be discounted. He has distinguished himself as a dynamic intellectual, and his Nobel Peace Prize for his contribution to economics is a testament to his one-of-a-kind contribution in the field. However,...

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Peace: A Desired State for Humanity Peace is the most wanted but seldom found object. It refers to a state of calm in which there is no disorder, aggression, or terror. At the present, humanity's evolutionary challenge is to achieve harmony. Many nations around the globe are attempting to find a...

One of the most important challenges affecting the world today is not just the rise of extremism, but also the pace at which international security is declining. Over the past decade, the world has seen the proliferation of extremist organizations that have proven to be a significant threat to the...

Words: 2547

Equal rights are unalienable and natural rights that everyone has. Human rights are important because they promote peaceful coexistence between the government and its people. Governments often wield authority over their citizens, and the best way to regulate or regulate that power is to grant people some constitutional rights (Alain...

Words: 1977

Humans coexisting in harmony and cohesion is what unity means. Togetherness refers to a world in which people live as one nation, bound by shared regard for one another's differences. Recognizing the human rights inherent in peaceful coexistence is what mutual respect means. Respect for human rights guarantees that citizens...

In terms of theme and rhyme, this paper produces a poem that is modeled after the poem To My Close and Caring Husband. Its core focus will be the quest for unity. It will also take a textual, stylistic, and thematic approach, similar to Bradstreet s poem. In...

Due to the negative effects of war on the economy, politics, and social spheres, many nations have always preferred peace. Many countries have gone to war in the past and developed weapons like man-made satellites, atomic bombs, and guns to scare away their adversaries. The impact, however, was massive, with...

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Article Contents

Conceptions of peace, positive peace as a priority in the global mindset, scholarly myopia and positive peace, studying peace, how to study peace: some guidelines, exploring peace: looking beyond war and negative peace.

Paul F. Diehl is Associate Provost and Ashbel Smith Professor of Political Science at the University of Texas-Dallas. Previously, he was Henning Larsen Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He served as President of the International Studies Association for the 2015-16 term. His areas of expertise include the causes of war, UN peacekeeping, and international law.

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Paul F. Diehl, Exploring Peace: Looking Beyond War and Negative Peace, International Studies Quarterly , Volume 60, Issue 1, March 2016, Pages 1–10, https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqw005

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Concern about war and large-scale violence has long dominated the study of international security. To the extent that peace receives any scholarly attention, it primarily does so under the rubric of “negative peace:” the absence of war. This article calls for a focus on peace in international studies that begins with a reconceptualization of the term. I examine the limitations of negative peace as a concept, discuss “positive peace,” and demonstrate empirically that Nobel Peace Prize winners have increasingly been those recognized for contributions to positive peace. Nevertheless, scholarly emphasis remains on war, violence, and negative peace—as demonstrated by references to articles appearing in a leading peace-studies journal and to papers presented at International Studies Association meetings. Peace is not the inverse or mirror image of war and therefore requires different theoretical orientations and explanatory variables. The article concludes with a series of guidelines on how to study peace.

Research on war and traditional security concerns has dominated international studies. 1 This should not surprise us. Nor is this focus necessarily unjustified. Realist thought provided a theoretical lens that assumed conflict inheres in international affairs. It held that realpolitik processes overwhelmingly shaped world politics. In addition, the human and economic costs of war—and other serious forms of violence—made it of the utmost importance for scholarship and policymaking. The wars of the twentieth century directly claimed over 40 million lives ( Sarkees and Wayman 2010 ). Countless more died indirectly as consequences of those conflicts. In 2014, governments worldwide spent almost two trillion dollars on military preparedness ( SIPRI 2014 )—a testament to the primacy of security issues in many national capitals. The resources and attention—in both political and diplomatic terms—devoted to war and related defense issues are substantial. They often crowd out other problems on the international agenda, including those associated with development, health, and human rights. 2

Scholars should not abandon a concern with war and violence. Rather, I argue that they should pay greater attention to peace . They should do so in a fashion that moves beyond its conventional conceptions and operational definitions. 3 I begin with a critique of current conceptual approaches to peace; I focus on how the traditional “absence of war” conception limits research and leads to some absurd categorizations. Indeed, this scholarly approach lags behind more popular notions of peace, evident in the selection of recent Nobel Peace Prize winners.

The following section considers a range of scholarship, both historical and contemporary, arguing that consideration of positive peace remains a minority research focus in international studies. In the second half of the article, I redress this shortcoming by demonstrating how patterns of peace and conflict in the international system differ, how independent variables play different roles in peace and conflict studies, and, finally, how certain research choices bring us closer to giving peace its rightful place in international studies.

Scholarly studies usually define peace as the absence of war. Prominent works on the decline of war ( Goldstein 2011 ; Pinker 2011 ) argue that the world is more peaceful largely because of declining violent behavior—particularly that resulting in battle deaths. An extensive scholarly literature explores the “democratic peace” ( Russett and Oneal 2001 ). This depends entirely on the absence of a bona fide war between two democracies, not the absence of armed conflict or highly militarized interactions per se. Even competitors to the democratic peace, such as the “territorial peace” ( Gibler 2012 ) and the “capitalist peace” ( Schneider and Gleditsch 2010 ), concentrate on the absence of war rather than more positive conceptions of peace. Similarly, some call the post-World War II period the “Long Peace” ( Gaddis 1987 ), defined as the longest period of history without a war between major power states. Yet, the Cold War was a period of superpower competition characterized by the development of extensive nuclear arsenals, unprecedented military spending, and a variety of interstate and civil proxy wars (see Westad 2007 ).

Defining peace as the absence of war makes sense for scholars interested in the understanding the conditions that generate war and other forms of violence. Nevertheless, it produces some absurd categorizations for those who want to focus on explaining peace. In the peace-as-not-war conception, North Korea has been at peace with South Korea and the United States for over six decades. After all, no major military engagements—in the form of sustained and direct fighting—have occurred since 1953. Similarly, we would code the Iranian-Israeli relationship, at least since 2000, as “peaceful.” The only direct hostile interactions between those two states has involved sporadic and covert action—such as the assassination of diplomats and nuclear scientists or the planting of computer viruses in the software that operates nuclear power plants. Yet most policymakers and other observers would rightly scoff at the notion that any of these relationships are peaceful. The idea that the Korean peninsula and the Iranian-Israeli relationship are just as “peaceful” as contemporary French-German or United States-Canadian relations defies common sense.

Peace as the absence of war is also problematic when looking within states. Scholars could classify Gambia as peaceful (certainly in comparison to Syria or Afghanistan) given the rarity of internal violence there. Nevertheless, from a peace perspective, it is a very poor country (182 nd in GDP), with only 31 percent of the population having access to electricity ( World Bank 2014 ) and an authoritarian government with a bad human rights record ( Cignarelli, Richards, and Clay 2014 ). Looking only at the absence of war, scholars place Gambia in the same peace category as Sweden and Norway, despite its tremendous gap with them on all dimensions of human security. Similarly, the end of civil wars when one side achieves victory—as happened in Rwanda—is peaceful only in a negative sense. Nevertheless, given the continuing violence (albeit at lower levels than that of genocide) and human rights violations, it seems incongruous to classify that state in the same category as Belgium or India, which have had their own struggles with ethnic/linguistic differences.

In order to study peace, one needs a conceptualization that is not a mirror image of or “symmetric” to war (for a definition of symmetry in this context, see Goertz and Mahoney 2012 ). There exists a long-standing and extensive discussion on peace and related ideas (see Boulding 1978 ; Galtung 1985 ; Mueller 2007 ; Rapoport 1992 ; see Gleditsch, Nordkavelle, and Strand 2014 ; Isard 2000 ; and Regan 2014 for brief histories; see Carroll, Fink, and Mohraz 1983 for an early compilation of sources), but few efforts at synthesizing different conceptual ideas and even fewer at providing systematic and measurable definitions.

Most conceptions of peace begin with “negative peace,” most famously associated with Galtung (2012 ; see also Boulding 1978 ). Variations in scholarly works include different labels such as “precarious peace” ( George 2000 ), “adversarial peace” ( Bengtsson 2000 ), “pre-peace” ( Bayer 2010 ), “conditional peace” ( George 2000 ), or “cold peace” ( Miller 2001 ). The central part of these terms is still the absence of violent conflict.

Negative peace is an important concept, and it is more nuanced than merely stating that actors are not at war. Nevertheless, it does not get at the positive peace elements that characterize many friendly relationships. In those interactions, war is absent, but many other conditions operate. These include extensive cooperation and integration between actors. Non-traditional aspects of security, such as human security, development, and human rights characterize the relationship between states and constituent groups. Some conceptions also include key values embedded in the relationship; these include equity and justice. For example, a 2015 survey ( Advanced Consortium 2015 ) of scholars on the concept of “sustainable peace” identified five thematic categories of key elements beyond the one dealing with violence: (i) well-being; (ii) quality of relations, cooperation, and interdependence; (iii) conflict management and resolution; (iv) access to resources, equality, and human security; and (v) institutional capacity and governance.

A full elaboration of positive peace exceeds the scope of this article, and the aspects of it may vary by context: state-state, government-population, group-group, individual-individual, and various combinations thereof. As illustrations, however, consider two recent efforts at developing continuums along which actor relationships vary.

In Goertz, Diehl, and Balas (2016) , we create a “peace scale” of five ideal type categories along which relationships between states vary. Scholars often highlight two categories of rivalry (severe and lesser) as well as negative peace, defined here and elsewhere though by reference to more than violent conflict and its absence. Two categories of relationships on the positive peace side of the scale are “warm peace” and “security communities.” Consider security communities, a term that first became prominent with the work of Deutsch, Burrell, and Kann (1957) but has also received recent attention from others (see the collection by Adler and Barnett 1998a ). Although conceptually a security community could include a formal merger of two political entities, in practice, states retain their sovereign independence to a substantial degree. War is not only unthinkable between members, but extensive communication links and transaction flows also bind the parties together ( Deutsch et al. 1957 ). Security communities might also involve shared identities, values, and meanings as well as interactions at several levels (private as well as governmental) and common long-term interests ( Adler and Barnett 1998b ). The relationships are mutually rewarding and reflective of harmonious interests ( Alker 1977 ).

Hallmark dimensions of “positive” peace are expectations and mechanisms for peaceful conflict resolution; war or the use of military force as a means of conflict resolution is “unthinkable,” or has a zero probability. Although peace scholars differ on some of the dimensions, four related core characteristics define the extreme end of positive peace: (i) absence of major territorial claims, (ii) institutions for conflict management, (iii) high levels of functional interdependence, and (iv) satisfaction with the status quo. Goertz et al. (2016) then proceed to code all state-state relationships from 1900 to 2006 on their scale using a variety of indicators and sources. Almost all relationships on the scale including rivalries (as most are not at war at a given point in time) are “peaceful” if the absence of war were the only criterion. Using a broader definition of peace and a wider variety of indicators allows scholars to differentiate between US-Canada and India-Pakistan relations, as well as track important changes toward more peaceful relations such as those involving Israel-Egypt and US-Cuba.

The previous scale concerned interstate relationships. More broadly applicable for states, groups, individuals, and other actors is the Davenport Peace Scale ( Davenport 2015) . His seven-point scale from “Opposition” to “Mutuality,” with “Indifference” as the middle category, tries to capture many different kinds of interactions. Four dimensions place relationships in the seven categories: behavior, organization, language, and values. For example, mutuality involves integrating and consistent behaviors, inclusive organizations, language that refers to shared identities and common missions, and shared and positive values of community. Although Davenport (2015) briefly applies this scale to the United States and African-Americans, this has not yet been widely applied or assessed. The two efforts noted here and others (for example, Wallensteen 2015 ) are in their nascent stages, at least compared to conflict scales.

Decisions of the Nobel Committee in awarding its Peace Prize illustrate the importance of positive peace. Looking at the 96 prizes awarded to 129 laureates (some prizes are shared) over the 1901-2015 period reveals an increasing propensity for positive peace efforts to receive recognition. I coded all Nobel winners, by year, for the period according to whether the award was primarily for promoting negative peace, positive peace, or some combination thereof. 4 This coding reflects the official statements and rationales provided by the Nobel Committee on its website. 5

Negative peace efforts include all aspects dealing with the termination or moderation of existing hostile relationships, including the end of wars. Thus, efforts at disarmament, negotiating agreements that ended or moderated war and rivalries, and the like are negative peace efforts. For example, the 1994 award to Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin was negative peace diplomacy. Indeed, anything that explicitly dealt with war and its consequences was coded as negative peace. Thus, awards to the International Committee of the Red Cross (1917, 1944, and 1963) for directly assisting refugees during war and prisoners of war was regarded primarily as an effort at negative peace. 6 In contrast, positive peace efforts deal with non-traditional security concerns that do not directly deal with war and violence. Such elements include awards for promoting development, human rights, and the status of women. For example, the 2014 winners—Kailash Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzai—were both recognized for “their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education.”

Table 1 reports the patterns of Nobel winners for the full period in which the award existed, as well as for two sub-periods that were inductively determined. Overall, there appears to be a balance between positive and negative peace over the course of Nobel history. There are approximately equal numbers of awards for each type of peace effort and slightly more than 10 percent that recognize both kinds of contributions. Nevertheless, there are substantial differences if one disaggregates the data, with the dividing line being World War II. Prior to 1945, more than two-thirds of the awards were for negative peace; most evident was US President Roosevelt receiving the award in 1906 for helping end the Russo-Japanese War. Various international peace movements, the Kellogg-Briand Pact to end war, and the League of Nations were all dedicated to ending war. Positive peace efforts, such as the 1930 award to Nathan Soderblom for religious efforts to promote peace and human rights, were the exception.

Nobel peace prizes, 1901–2015

Following World War II, there is a discernible shift in the decisions of the Nobel Committee to recognize positive peace and a broader security agenda. 7 Although traditional negative peace awards do not disappear (they still constitute one-third), positive peace recognition now constitutes a majority. The breadth of positive peace efforts is impressive, bringing in concerns with the environment, human rights, poverty, status of women, medicine, and economic development. For example, the latter is evident by the 2006 award to Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank for micro-lending programs. Successful initiatives in these areas might decrease the prospects for war in the longer term, but their immediate purposes are to promote positive peace values such as dignity, justice, and the fulfillment of the human potential.

Peace goes beyond the absence of war, and various conceptions of peace incorporate a variety of elements and values associated with positive peace. Furthermore, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee has increasingly recognized accomplishments in the positive peace area. Nevertheless, scholarly discourse on peace has lagged behind such attention to positive peace, as is evident by the analysis in the next section.

Despite the conceptual tools to address positive peace and increasing attention in the public sphere to such concerns, the scholarly literature has lagged behind in studying such topics. This ignorance or downplaying of positive peace is long-standing. In Quincy Wright’s classic A Study of War (1942) , only five of the almost 1500 pages are devoted to the meaning of peace. 8 The emphasis on war, violence, and negative peace is also evident in attempts to measure peace. The Global Peace Index purports to construct an aggregate indicator of peacefulness for each country in the world. 9 Nevertheless, virtually every one of the 27 indicators of internal and external peace used to build the aggregate index deal with negative peace; some examples include the homicide rate, access to small arms, military expenditures, and involvement in external conflicts. 10

The concentration of scholarly research on violent conflict and negative peace issues is most evident by systematic reference to two relevant outlets for such research: the Journal of Peace Research ( JPR ) and the International Studies Association (ISA) annual meeting. With respect to the former, Gleditsch et al. (2014) looked at the publication patterns for that journal in its first fifty years. The authors used content analysis on the titles of articles published in the period 1964-1991, and titles and abstracts for the period 1992-2012. Using the replication data from that article, 11 four search terms were used to signify whether a journal purportedly dedicated to scholarly studies of peace focused more extensively on conflict and negative peace concerns versus those dealing with positive peace; the search terms were “peace,” “war,” “conflict,” and “violence/violent.” With respect to the ISA annual meeting, an initial search of paper titles in the 2015 preliminary program used the same search terms as above and added “security” to the list. 12

The initial search generated a set of articles and papers that dealt broadly with peace and conflict issues. 13 The next step was to determine whether these works focused primarily on negative or positive peace. 14 Coding decisions on each source relied on a similar procedure.

Negative and positive peace are not always defined clearly, but the following conceptions were used in the coding. Negative peace is simply the absence of conflict. 15 Articles or papers that explicitly treat peace as the opposite of conflict fall into this category. Others that do not explicitly define peace as the absence of conflict, but do not consider variation in the category of peace, are also coded as negative peace. There are several topics on which the literature almost invariably treats peace and conflict as a dichotomy. Papers on these subjects are automatically coded as negative peace, unless there is evidence in the title or abstract that a positive conception of peace is used. These include causes of war, deterrence, arms control, conflict/peace duration, 16 weapons, traditional peacekeeping, and traditional security studies. 17

Positive peace considers one or more dimensions of variation within the category of situations that are absent of conflict. It refers to the existence (or at least possibility) of close relationships or societal prosperity exceeding that of simple negative peace. Works that do not lump all situations in which conflict is absent into a single category, and instead capture varying degrees or types of peace, are coded as positive peace. This includes most studies that move beyond the simple presence or absence of violence to consider the underlying disagreement that produces the violence. Several categories of studies tend to fall extensively into the domain of positive peace, specifically those dealing with conflict resolution, human rights, reconciliation, justice, economic development, human security, and gender. 18

Figure 1 tracks the publication of negative and positive peace articles in the Journal of Peace Research over the 1964-2012 period.

Journal of peace research: positive and negative peace studies, 1964-2012

Even a journal dedicated to peace research has had a notable pattern of focusing on conflict and negative peace-related works. Except for a brief time at the outset of the journal, war and negative peace concerns have always been a majority in the pages of Journal of Peace Research . Indeed, the gap between negative and positive peace has actually increased over time. This has occurred in parallel with a shift in research focus from interstate conflict to civil war. This is not to say that the newer topics on the security agenda do not appear in the journal. Human rights, for example, are now subjects of greater scholarly scrutiny. Yet as Gleditsch et al. (2014) point out, the concentration of research in that area is primarily about the conditions for violations or repression, a negative peace concern similar to the focus on war and violence in traditional security studies. The authors conclude: “Negative peace, in the sense of reducing war, has always been the main focus of peace research” (2014, 155). 19

One might expect that ISA members would be more broadly concerned with peace issues than Journal of Peace Research authors given that the former includes those from more than 120 different countries and those who have a wider set of research concerns. The methodological, theoretical, and political orientations of ISA authors are less Western-centered and more open to Global South concerns, which better incorporate positive peace issues and do not as strongly reflect traditional security conceptions. Table 2 collapses the search terms into peace and conflict-related categories. Understanding that titles, and even abstracts, can be misleading, the papers are then coded for whether positive or negative peace concerns were addressed in the research. This more nuanced analysis recognizes that even papers with titles purporting to be about peace could really only be about war and negative peace; the opposite might be true of papers that emphasize conflict or war in their titles and abstracts.

War and Peace in the ISA Preliminary Program, 2015

ISA conference papers with “peace” in their titles are a distinct minority, less than one-fifth (18.8 percent) of those scheduled for presentation at the 2015 meeting. In addition, over 40 percent of those articles actually deal with negative peace more than its positive aspects. These results paint a picture of an international studies discipline still preoccupied with war and violence. Yet not all the findings are discouraging for those who would advocate a positive peace research agenda. Although over 80 percent of paper titles include conflict-related words, a good portion of them (just over one-third) is, in fact, dedicated to positive peace. Thus, ISA papers are somewhat more inclined than the published research to deal with positive peace, although it is still a minority.

The results above indicate that positive peace concerns do not receive the same scholarly attention as those focusing on war, violence, and related foci. 20 Giving greater attention to peace concerns, however, requires some fundamental shifts in how we approach research and the kinds of causal factors needed to explain peace.

Peace as the Inverse of War?

The traditional view of peace is that it is merely the inverse of war and therefore can be explained by reference to the same variables and processes as war. This is best reflected in Geoffrey Blainey’s (1973 , 293) classic work The Causes of War : “War and peace appear to share the same framework of causes … The same set of factors should appear in explanations of the outbreak of war [and the] outbreak of peace”. 21 Such a claim, however, is inconsistent with patterns of war and peace, and indeed an analysis of various causal factors indicates that peace is far from a mirror image of or symmetrical to war ( Goertz and Mahoney 2012 ).

In Figure 2 , the incidence of civil war, 22 interstate war, and “positive peace relationships” between states (taken from Goertz et al. 2016 23 ) at the international system level are mapped against one another for the period since 1945 until as recently as data permit. If peace is merely the inverse of war, then the resulting patterns for conflicts ought to be the opposite of those for peace (the correlation should be strongly negative). 24 In fact, they are not, and this helps further establish peace as a separate and independent phenomenon.

Civil war, interstate war, and positive peace relationships

Positive peace relationships are somewhat related to the incidence of interstate war (correlation is modest, r  = −.33, meaning positive peace increases when war decreases). 25 On the one hand, it is conceivable that relationships in which war was unthinkable would be associated with lower levels of interstate war in the international system. Nevertheless, most of those states that moved into positive peace relationships did so after being in negative peace relationships, such as members of the European Union; these were unlikely candidates for war in any case. The integration processes of those states in positive peace (for example, the United States-Canada) go well beyond not fighting one another. Thus, the correlation is unlikely to represent a causal relationship.

In popular discourse, there is sometimes the claim that civil war has replaced or substituted for interstate conflict after 1989, and therefore peaceful state relationships are just a reflection of that shift. Civil conflict jumps in the 1970s and stays at high levels until the beginning of the 1990s when it declines to levels only slightly greater than those in the 1960s. Positive peace relationships generally move somewhat in tandem ( r  = +.48) with civil conflict, but this actually reverses after 1989 (r = −.21). Thus, for the period as a whole, increasingly new peaceful relationships among states are occurring at the same time that civil wars might be increasing. Yet there is no compelling rationale that the same factors are driving both phenomena, suggesting that peaceful state relationships are not closely related to other conflict phenomena. At least at the international system level, peaceful relationships are not the inverse of, or even in some cases strongly related to, conflict phenomena.

Explaining peace also requires different theoretical formulations. As an illustration of how war and peace explanations overlap and (mostly) differ, consider four different and prominent factors used in models of interstate war: geographic proximity, power distributions, alliances, and trade (see Bremer 1992 for a treatment). The causal symmetry question is whether we would find the same causal relationships—only the signs (positive or negative effects) of the coefficients in a statistical equation would change—with the same independent variables. That is, would the same factors matter, but with the opposite effects, if positive peace were the outcome variable rather than war or militarized disputes?

First, perhaps the strongest and most consistent predictor of interstate conflict is geographic contiguity. There is a strong positive correlation between geographic contiguity and positive peace. Almost all positive peace relationships involve either contiguous states or those that are linked by another peaceful relationship link between the two non-contiguous states (as in the European Union) between the states involved. Thus, geographic contiguity is positively associated with both war and peace. If peace and war were mirror images, this makes no sense, as the effects should be the inverse of one another.

Relative power is a critical variable in most war studies. The capability or power of states is also a central part of realist thought, as well as some post-modern treatments that emphasize exploitation and inequality. One generally consistent finding in the conflict literature is that relative power parity is associated with war; the power transition model is based on this idea ( Organski and Kugler 1981 ). Once the dependent variable becomes positive peace, however, it is not clear that either equal or unequal capabilities should be associated with positive peace. Systematic analyses would likely find that the relative power factor is insignificant and therefore does little to explain why some actors move to positive peace while others do not. To say that relative power does not matter means that theories of peace will be distinctive from those of war and violence.

Results about alliances in the causes of war tradition vary a great deal ( Kang 2012 ). Alliances should be strongly associated with positive peace. Even if alliances were a causal factor for both peace and war, the causal logic behind such associations is quite different. Alliances are frequently elements of war models using a deterrent logic. In contrast, alliances could be part of positive peace, not in preventing violent conflict, but rather in further integrating political and security processes among member states. Goertz and Powers (2014) have shown that all but one multilateral alliance signed since 1989 fall within the context of multipurpose, regional organizations. Alliances become a tool of collective conflict management.

Finally, trade relations between states are a source of controversy in war studies. Scholarly disagreements exist on whether close economic ties between two states encourage more conflict, have little effect, or lower the chances for war (see Schneider 2010 ). In all cases though, trade is predominantly the independent variable, affecting the outbreak of war. In contrast, studies of positive peace would have trade and other economic ties as the dependent variable, the consequence of the processes promoting peace rather than the instigator.

If peace is not merely the inverse of war, then scholars need a different strategy. This is not merely a matter of choosing different research topics than the onset, dynamics, and outcomes of war. Some scholars might believe that they already study peace because their research is not about war per se. For example, human rights scholars do not necessarily deal with war (although a number study war crimes and related phenomena). Yet much of the scholarly work on this topic concerns the occurrence of human rights violations, much akin to a negative peace orientation in that scholars ignore the positive aspects of human rights formulations. Rather than violations (an important topic itself), peace-oriented research might investigate the conditions for the spread or deepening of human rights across or within societies. Similarly, studies of transitional justice that have exploded in the last decade might seemingly have the air of peace studies around them, and indeed, the focus on justice and individuals or groups (see below) move them away from traditional war and conflict studies. Nevertheless, many of these works, by definition in some cases, look at contexts following civil wars, with the shadow of negative peace around them (for example, Samii 2013 ). Pushing those studies to have a longer term orientation to see if transitional justice transforms attitudes, ensures functioning judicial systems, and ultimately promotes reconciliation would move them closer to understanding peace.

There is no one way to study peace, but there are some general principles that would take scholarly community in a better direction for understanding peace.

Looking Beyond and Below the State

For many years, studies of conflict have concentrated on states as the primary or exclusive political actors in the world. As a consequence, however, lower-level processes involving groups and individuals were discounted, ignored, or assumed away as in some rational actor formulations. As scholars moved to focus more on explaining civil war, the emphasis was still on the state as a whole or on the government as one of the key actors. This is not to say that research is exclusively this way or that change has not occurred, but these are general tendencies.

Positive peace occurs between states (witness the European Union), but it is still largely the exception to the mode of state relationships. 26 There are, however, numerous instances of peaceful processes outside of state relationships, particularly below the state level. Indeed, the last two decades has seen greater emphasis on such achievements recognized by the Nobel Committee. Rather than study the outbreak of violence between ethnic groups, a study of peace would examine how some groups have deep cooperation and integration with one another. For instance, in post-communist Romania, relations between the majority Romanians and minority Hungarians have been peaceful, perhaps due to the inclusion of the latter in the political system ( Mihailescu 2005 ). 27 There are also other levels of analysis—individuals, organizations, and other entities—that exhibit peace, and these occur not merely in post-conflict environments. International studies scholarship has moved significantly beyond the state in recent decades, but this shift has not necessarily included an exploration of peaceful relationships. Foci on violence, exploitation, and inequality (important in their own right) obscure the conditions needed to move beyond these maladies and foster cooperative relationships.

Moving Beyond the Focus on Great Powers

A corollary to the previous guideline involves looking beyond the great powers. Realist and Neorealist orientations, as well as many other theoretical frameworks (for example, world systems theory), direct their attention almost exclusively to major power relations. A Western or Euro-centric orientation usually accompanies this. A focus on war and competition might be appropriate for that context, but looking only at these actors misses a wide range of peaceful behaviors even if one concentrates only on states. A useful direction would be a shift, in part not whole, toward the Global South as articulated in Acharya (2014) . This requires more of a regional orientation than one focused on the global system. Even for state-centric studies, most of the “peace” is found within regional contexts, be they European Union and NAFTA or emerging security communities such as ASEAN ( Acharya 2001 ).

Moving Beyond Political Science

Most of the articles published in this journal, the flagship publication of ISA, have authors who are political scientists. Yet theoretically and empirically, this orientation is not always well suited to address matters of peace. 28 Standard realist formulations and others that emphasize anarchy in the international system put a premium on the struggle for power and eschew concerns with peace. 29 Only negative peace, as defined by hegemons and absent concerns with justice, usually appears in those orientations.

For those in the positivist and quantitative research tradition, most of the available data are about war and other violence. The Correlates of War (COW) Project 30 has assembled long historical series of data that are almost exclusively state focused and deal with outcome variables about war and other high-level militarized conflicts (for example, militarized disputes). The project concentrated on realist factors (alliances, capability distribution, and the like) as initially the goal was to test realist propositions about conflict, even as it was agnostic a priori about their validity. 31 The Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) is similar in that its leading data collections deal with conflict, albeit these move beyond state-state interactions and have a lower violence threshold than COW. 32 UCDP does have a data collection on peace agreements and their implementation, but these deal with situations in which there was a recent serious conflict, and the concentration of studies using data similar to this is on whether civil war renews or not rather than on whether positive peace is promoted. There is a lack of systematic data on peace comparable to the many and long-standing collections on war and violent conflict. 33

Many of the ideas and formulations for understanding peace will need to come outside of political science. For example, studies of psychology (for example, Bar-Tal 2000 ; Fry 2013 ) provide us with insights about attitudinal change that is essential for individuals, groups, and state leaders to regard others not merely as non-enemies, but rather as friends. Anthropological and sociological studies ( Boulding 2000 ; Melko 1973 ; for an overview, see Fabbro 1978 ) have included “peaceful societies,” those in which not only is violence rare but also deep cooperation and integration are present. Ideas about peace, both conceptual and normative, often derive from religion, history, sociology, and other approaches. Even if political science is the scholarly orientation, insights from these other disciplines are essential. ISA now seems well-positioned for undertaking such an exploration; what was once an organization made up primarily of political scientists now counts a smaller percentage of its members from that discipline.

Long-Term Processes Versus Short-Term Events

As one moves from peace to war, there is also a shift from understanding relationships rather than single events or sets of integrated events. By definition, relationships represent ongoing and usually long-term interactions. These will necessitate modelling long-term processes leading to peace, which is likely to occur in steps or phases rather than abruptly. In contrast, with some exceptions (for example, studies of rivalries, see Colaresi, Rasler, and Thompson 2007 ), research on war and violence centers on factors immediately preceding and following armed conflict. Whereas riots, civil wars, and militarized interstate disputes are easy to spot, peace is something that requires time to develop, and scholars will need some historical hindsight to determine whether actions or events are part of a pattern of peaceful relations that is sustaining over time rather than anomalies.

The long-term orientation has obvious implications for the research design of peace studies. Nevertheless, research design should follow from theoretical argument, and therefore more importantly, the construction of explanations for the development or dynamics of peace must reflect processes over time and across space. 34 For example, the spread of democracy across regions or globally might (or might not) be a prerequisite for the development of peaceful relations.

Normative Agendas with Systematic Research

Peace studies 35 as a subfield has a long history in international and related studies. One of its characteristics is that its research agenda has a strong normative component. That is not to say that war studies do not; most conflict scholars who study violence implicitly or explicitly do so with the view that such conflict is undesirable, and by understanding the conditions for violence, we can lessen its likelihood. Yet any conception of peace necessitates some definition of values or priorities beyond the absence of violence. As noted in the survey of scholars of sustainable peace ( Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict and Complexity 2015 ), such values can include human rights, justice, economic equality, and other aspects. Because these are perceived as falling on a leftist political agenda, such peace concerns are often dismissed by political leaders and other elites; indeed, some peace studies writing devolves away from scholarly research toward polemics.

I do not advocate that scholars of international studies reject normative concerns, but rather embrace them in studies of peace. Scholars have a unique responsibility ( Singer 1985 ) to address contemporary political concerns and to assist in the definitions of what is important to the international community around us. At the same time, however, the rejection of value-free social science should not come at the expense of the social science component. The systematic assessment of peace must not only meet our standards of scholarship and publication but also establish the credibility necessary to contribute to the vital debates of the day on a variety of issues.

Scholars need to pay greater attention to peace as a focus for international studies research. They traditionally concentrate on war and other violent conflict and thereby consider only negative peace: the absence of war or violence. Studying peace requires, first and foremost, broader conceptions of peace. These include considerations of justice, human rights, and other aspects of human security. Recent Nobel Peace Prize awards already reflect such a focus.

There is reason for optimism that the scholarly community will pay greater attention to peace concerns. Several new works ( Wallensteen 2015 ; Davenport, Melander, and Regan 2015 ; Goertz et al. 2016 ) take up the mantle, and their new conceptualizations should stimulate further theorizing, data collection, and empirical analyses. Scholars are also highly responsive to contemporary political phenomena ( Diehl 2002 ); the upsurge in studies of democracy resulted, in part, from the increase in democratic movements and regimes in the late 20 th and early 21 st centuries. As many post-conflict contexts demonstrate, the end of a war provides no guarantee that peace—both broadly and narrowly defined—will occur. Indeed many societies relapse into fighting. Thus, pressing policy concerns compel us to find not only the ways to avoid the renewal of war but also the processes that can promote deep peacebuilding. Scholars are paying some attention to these concerns and will likely do so in the future

The call for a peace agenda should not imply an end to the prior emphasis on war. Indeed, studies of war and violence have produced a wealth of knowledge over the past decades; they remain vital elements of international studies scholarship. Even with an emphasis on positive peace, understanding negative peace might remain essential. Negative peace might transition to, or constitute tipping points for, positive-peace relationships. Yet understanding negative peace should not be an end in itself. Instead, it provides an opportunity to explore more extensive and lasting peaceful relationships.

Indeed, the International Security Studies Section of ISA has, by far, the greatest number of members.

Nevertheless, negative peace might be less important to other elites, notably those at the UN, see Sylvester (1980) .

A related call is made by Regan (2014) in his presidential address to the Peace Science Society (International).

When the rationale for the award was unclear, it was coded in the same category as “both.” For shared prizes, each was coded individually and then aggregated. The majority motivation for the honorees was coded. For example, if one laureate was honored for positive peace efforts and the other for negative peace, the year was coded as “both.”

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/ (last accessed on 9 November 2015). Recent awards include a statement on the “motivation” for the award. Some earlier awards include summaries and press releases that directly or indirectly address the basis for the award. The earliest awards often contain only a brief description of the laureate; these along with other cases in which the motivation for the award was unclear required some additional biographical research in order to arrive at a coding decision.

In other cases, assisting refugees in long-term repatriation and resettlement was coded as positive peace given efforts at reconciliation and other aspects of human security.

One might have expected the key breakpoint in the shifts toward positive peace to be the end of the Cold War, but the patterns after 1989 are very similar to those in the first 35 years of the post-World War II period.

I am indebted to Rudolph Rummel for pointing this out on his website https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/TJP.CHAP3.HTM (last accessed on 7 January 2016).

See http://www.visionofhumanity.org/sites/default/files/Global%20Peace%20Index%20Report%202015_0.pdf (last accessed on 7 January 2016).

Even “neighboring country relations” is operationalized in terms of tension and invasions rather than integration. “UN peacekeeping funding” and “Refugees and IDPs” might include some positive peace elements, but these are strongly correlated with the outbreak and termination of armed conflict and therefore primarily deal with negative peace concerns.

https://www.prio.org/JPR/Datasets/ (last accessed on 15 January 2015).

Searching a PDF of the conference program identified every instance in which the terms listed below appeared in the title of an ISA paper. The exception was the “conflict” term, which because of a PDF encoding issue required the use of the underlying database by the ISA staff. Only instances of the term in paper titles were included in the analysis; panel titles and institutional affiliations were not.

Papers received multiple counts across categories if they contained multiple search terms. In other words, a single paper could appear under “Conflict” and “War.” Some papers were not included in the data despite containing one or more search terms. In some cases, this occurred because it could not be determined, even after consulting the abstract, whether a paper employed a positive or negative conception of peace. In other cases, a term appeared but was not actually related to peace or conflict (for example, a political economy study that uses the phrase “Cold War” to describe a time period). In a few cases, search terms appear in proper nouns in studies that are not directly about peace or conflict. For instance, a study on the internal politics of the UN Security Council would only be included if it is related to peace or conflict. Some papers on conflict or peace studies disciplines themselves are not part of the data.

There are a handful of papers with explanatory factors that relate to conflict but with outcomes that are impossible to categorize in terms of positive or negative peace; for example, a paper on the effect of war, along with other variables, on partisan alignments is really concerned with the latter and not centrally with peace and conflict per se.

Most of the studies of war and violence never mention peace, and their implicit or explicit binary conceptualization (war/no war or violence/no violence) places them in the negative peace category.

Even studies of “peace duration” are really about negative peace as they measure the elapsed time from the end of one war to the onset of another.

If either the theoretical or empirical components of a paper uses a negative conception of peace, it is coded as negative peace. In other words, in a study with a conceptual framework that allows for varying degrees or types of peace, but it is clear that the empirical analysis does not measure any variation in the category of peace, the paper is coded as negative peace. Similarly, if an empirical measure has the potential to capture positive peace, but is within a negative peace framework, the paper is coded as negative peace.

If one component of a paper uses a positive conception of peace and there is no clear contradiction with another component (the theory considers positive peace and it is unclear whether it is measured empirically), the paper is coded as positive peace.

This conclusion is based not only on the 50 year publishing history of the Journal of Peace Research but also on an analysis of articles in the Journal of Conflict Resolution , another prominent journal with a title that is suggestive of a positive peace orientation.

There are different ways to define positive and negative peace and one could quibble with individual coding decisions, but the overall patterns are unlikely to be different with alternative specifications.

I am indebted to Andrew Owsiak for pointing out this quote to me.

This includes civil war and internationalized civil war from the Uppsala Conflict Data Project as reported in Goertz et al. (2016) .

Positive peace relationships are those in the “warm peace” and “security communities” categories referenced above.

If peace is defined only as the absence of war, the correlation between peace and war would be perfectly negative.

Because of the rarity of interstate war, values for that variable are aggregated in five-year blocks and repeated for each year. The correlation does not change substantially with alternative measures.

Goertz, Diehl, and Balas (2016) report that positive peace state relationships are extremely rare prior to 1945 and constitute only about 17 percent of all relationships at their peak in 2006, and usually a much smaller percentage in periods from 1945 until the end of the twentieth century.

See also Varshney (2002) .

See Richmond (2008) in general for how various international relations theories treat peace.

Kupchan (2010) is one study that moves beyond the absence of war, but his concern is with slowly improving relations between former rivals and not peace between states that lack hostile interactions in their pasts.

http://www.correlatesofwar.org/ (last accessed on 7 January 2016).

Some path dependency in the form of needing to maintain a time series set of data has led updates to continue collecting data primarily on the same variables rather than venturing in other directions, including those involving peace.

http://www.pcr.uu.se/data/ (last accessed on 7 January 2016).

The previously referenced Goertz et al. (2016) work is an exception and has coded all state relationships from 1900-2016 on a peace scale.

Many scholars of war and conflict would agree that this would be appropriate for understanding conflict as well, rather than just looking at proximate causes.

See Cortright (2008) for a history.

Author's note: The author would like to thank a number of groups and individuals for their assistance in preparing this article and the associated presidential address presented at the 2015 International Studies Association meeting in New Orleans. Faculty and graduate students from the Department of Political Science and the Program in Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security (ACDIS) at the University of Illinois provided helpful feedback on an early version of this address. David Bowden was invaluable in collecting and analyzing the data presented in this paper; he and Tyler Pack also provided a useful check on my coding of Nobel Peace Prize winners. Nils Petter Gleditsch and John Vasquez offered useful specific suggestions for improvement. Mike Ryckman was terrific in assembling data on the ISA program in forms that made it possible to analyze them for this article. I am also grateful to Gary Goertz and Alexandru Balas for allowing me to use some of the arguments and data from our book The Puzzle of Peace . Finally, I would like to thank Gary Goertz, Pat Regan, and David Bowden for reading drafts of this article and making timely and valuable suggestions.

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• School Education /

Essay On Peace for School Students in 100 – 300

• Updated on  
• Nov 22, 2023

Peace is something we all wish for as it allows us growth and prosperity in life. A society without peace cannot survive for long and there will always be disputes between people. Peace is defined as the absence of any disturbance, conflict, or violence. It exists on various levels, including personal, interpersonal, societal, and international. Writing a peace essay requires a proper understanding of this term, from its importance in our lives to how it can shape a better tomorrow. Here are some samples of essay on peace for school students.

Table of Contents

• 1 Essay on Peace in 100 Words
• 2 Essay on Peace in 200 Words
• 3.1 Why is Peace Important?
• 3.2 Ways to Promote Peace

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Essay on Peace in 100 Words

Peace refers to societal friendship and harmony, where negative activities like violence, hostility, and hatred are not present. The significance of peace can have multiple levels, from individual to societal and international. Peace is something that comes from within. 

On a personal level, a person must have inner calmness and contentment to achieve peace. Peace becomes a broader aspect at the societal and international level, which involves concepts like social justice, equality, and the presence of diplomacy and cooperation between nations.

Achieving and maintaining peace requires efforts from all sides. In this way, it can foster understanding and tolerance among individuals and communities. 

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Essay on Peace in 200 Words

Peace can only be achieved when everyone in the room abides by the laws of friendship and cooperation. Consider this quote on peace by Mahatma Gandhi, ‘If you want real peace in the world, start with children.’ He and thousands of other freedom fighters struggled for decades to achieve true peace.

Although now are not living in a colonial era, we are struggling for true peace; a society free from poverty, hunger, corruption, and crime; one where everyone can feel safe. Only in a world free from the constant threat of violence, conflict, or war can allow us to pursue our goals, develop relationships, and lead fulfilling lives.

Nations establish diplomatic relations so that peace can be maintained at the international level. This cooperation between nations is essential to prevent conflicts that can have far-reaching consequences. Peace is an essential component for the protection of human rights, ensuring that individuals can live free from violence and oppression.

We are the future and it is our duty to establish law and order to achieve true peace. Only then we can cultivate the seed of education, healthcare, and environmental conservation . Our today’s efforts will affect our tomorrow. The importance of nurturing and maintaining peace cannot be overstated, for it is the cornerstone upon which the aspirations of individuals and societies rest.

Also Read: Essay on New Year for School Students

Essay on Peace in 300 Words

We all want a free-will life; one where we can achieve and fulfil our goals in real time. Peace is very important for individuals, society, and nations to strive towards the road of success. Achieving peace requires collective efforts so that we can create a world where everyone can live free from fear, violence, and the threat of conflict. 

We all want a life of free will, where we can achieve and fulfill our goals in real time but how can it be possible with so much bloodshed and mayhem around the corner, where one man is threatening others with a missile?

Why is Peace Important?

Peace is a multifaceted concept and its importance varies from individual level to global level.

• Peace offers us all the necessary conditions to lead a secure and fulfilled life.
• A peaceful society creates a sense of brotherhood, where everyone is respected and appreciated for their achievements.
• It fosters cooperative relationships among communities and societies and encourages cooperation, understanding, and tolerance.
• New heights of economic development can be achieved in a peaceful society.
• Communities can exchange ideas and traditions to foster mutual understanding and appreciation.
• Peace is considered as an investment in the well-being of future generations.

Ways to Promote Peace

There are multiple ways in which we can promote peace, starting with ourselves and understanding how beneficial it can be for us in career prosperity and building relationships.

• Volunteering for peaceful rallies.
• Create a peaceful mantra/ affirmation.
• Sign a peace pledge.
• Learn to forgive your enemies.
• Understand what are the causes of violence.
• Listen to learned individuals.
• Learn from others’ mistakes.
• Learn to say sorry and accept your mistakes

Creating a peaceful society is not as difficult as it may sound; for it requires collective effort. Once we understand what we are capable of achieving, then we are just a step away from building a ‘perfect world.’

Ans: Peace is essential for the prosperity of individuals and society as a whole.  A society without peace cannot survive for long and there will always be disputes between people. Peace is defined as the absence of any disturbance, conflict, or violence. It exists on different various levels, including personal, interpersonal, societal, and international.

Ans: Without peace, our world cannot survive, as there will be conflicts and wars between countries, communities will act in non-cooperative ways, and individuals will have grudges against each other. Peace is very important to establish a world where everyone can live in harmony and lead a prosperous life.

Ans: Mentioned below are some lines on the importance of peace: -Peace is the bedrock to edifice human progress and prosperity. -Peace is like the thread that is capable of weaving the fabric of harmony and understanding. -Peace is the key to unlocking the potential of individuals and communities. -Peace is like a guiding light, that offers us solace, security, and a path to reconciliation. -Peace is a lifelong journey towards a world where compassion triumphs over conflict.

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100, 150, 200, 250, & 300 Word Paragraph & Essay About Peace

Table of Contents

A Paragraph about Peace in 100 Word

Peace is a beautiful state of calm and harmony in the world. It is when there is no fighting, no arguments, and no wars. In a peaceful world, people treat each other with kindness and respect. There are no bullies, and everyone is safe and free to be themselves. In a peaceful world, animals roam freely, without fear of being hunted or harmed. Nature flourishes, with clear blue skies and clean rivers. When there is peace, children can play and go to school without worrying about violence. People work together to solve problems and make the world a better place. Peace is a precious treasure that we should all strive for.

A Paragraph about Peace in 150 Word

Peace is a beautiful thing that brings happiness and harmony to our lives. It is like a calm river flowing peacefully, where there is no hate or violence. Imagine a world where people respect and accept one another, a world where conflicts are resolved peacefully. This is the world we all crave. Peace can be found in small acts of kindness, like sharing a smile or helping someone in need. It can also be achieved through understanding and forgiveness. When we learn to listen to others without judgment, we promote peace. Peace can be found in nature too, where birds chirp, rivers gurgle, and flowers bloom without any disputes. We can find peace within ourselves by practicing mindfulness, being grateful, and letting go of anger and resentment. By promoting peace in our own lives and communities, we contribute to a more peaceful world. Let us all strive to make peace our constant companion and spread its joy to everyone we meet.

A Paragraph about Peace in 200 Word

Peace is a wonderful feeling that everyone wishes for. It is when there is no fighting or violence, only happiness and calmness. In a peaceful world, people are kind to each other and help one another. They solve their problems by talking and listening, without hurting others. Peace allows us to live in harmony with everyone, no matter where they are from or what they believe in.

When we have peace, we can play and learn without fear. We can walk outside with a smile on our faces, knowing that we are safe. Peace helps us to focus on important things like education and friendships. We can express ourselves through art, music, and sports without any worries.

Peace also brings together people from different cultures and backgrounds. It helps us to appreciate our differences and learn from each other. In a peaceful world, we can celebrate our traditions and share our stories without judgment.

In conclusion, peace is a beautiful thing that we should always strive for. It makes our lives better and the world a happier place. Let’s work together to create peace and spread love and understanding everywhere we go.

A Paragraph about Peace in 250 Word

Peace is a beautiful and serene feeling that brings harmony and happiness to our lives. It is like a gentle breeze flowing through the air, calming our souls and filling our environment with tranquility. When there is peace, people work together, respecting and understanding one another. There are no conflicts, fights, or wars. Instead, there is cooperation, empathy, and love.

In a world filled with peace, children can play freely in the parks, laughing and sharing their joys without fear. They can grow and learn in safe and nurturing environments, surrounded by the support of their families and communities. Adults can pursue their dreams and ambitions, knowing that they are free to express themselves without facing discrimination or violence.

Peace is not just the absence of war, but also the presence of justice and equality. It means that everyone, regardless of their race, religion, or gender, has the same opportunities and rights. People are treated with fairness and kindness, knowing that their opinions and beliefs are respected.

In conclusion, peace is a state of harmony and calmness that brings people together and creates a better world for everyone. It is a precious gift that we must strive to achieve and preserve. Let us all work towards building a world where peace reigns and where every person can live their lives to the fullest, free from fear and hatred. Let us work for a future in which war and conflict are a thing of the past. Together, we can create a world of love and understanding. Let us strive for a world in which everyone is treated with respect and dignity.

A Paragraph about Peace in 300 Word

Peace is a beautiful word that brings warmth and happiness to our hearts. It is a feeling of calm and serenity that fills the air. In a world that can sometimes be chaotic, peace is like a little oasis where everything is harmonious. Imagine a world without wars, without arguments, without conflicts. That is what peace brings to our lives.

Peace means living in harmony with others and treating one another with love and respect. It means finding solutions to problems through peaceful and non-violent means. In a peaceful world, people can communicate and understand each other without resorting to violence. It is about listening to each other’s opinions and finding common ground.

In a peaceful world, we can go to sleep at night knowing that we are safe and secure. We don’t have to worry about our homes being destroyed or our loved ones getting hurt. Everyone can enjoy their basic rights and live without fear.

Peace is not just about the absence of war, it is also about inner peace. When we have inner peace, we feel calm and content within ourselves. We are able to manage our emotions and handle conflicts in a peaceful manner. Inner peace helps us live a happier and more fulfilling life.

As a 4th grader, it is important to understand the value of peace and how we can contribute to creating a peaceful world. We can be kind to others, help those in need, and resolve conflicts peacefully. We can spread love and positivity wherever we go.

In conclusion, peace is a wonderful thing that we should all strive for. It brings happiness, safety, and harmony to our lives. Let’s work together to create a peaceful world where everyone can live in unity and prosperity.

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In another possible world, more predictable perhaps than the one in which we live, instead of rushing every morning to check the latest news on Russia’s war in Ukraine, I would be regularly monitoring its weather forecast. I would be eagerly anticipating a long-planned trip to Kaliningrad to attend the birthday party of my favourite philosopher, and, apparently, also one of Vladimir Putin’s: Immanuel Kant. A flight to Moscow and a domestic transfer would have been booked for the end of this month, and I would be romantically, uncritically, somewhat inappropriately for a Kantian, daydreaming about my arrival. 

Should I try to emulate Kant’s legendary afternoon stroll through the then Prussian city, setting my watch to coincide with it as Königsberg’s residents were rumoured to have done? Should I head straight for the city centre, trying to find the famous “seven bridges of Königsberg”, the mathematical problem analysed by Leonhard Euler that laid the foundations to graph theory? Should I stop for a selfie on the banks of the Pregolya (once Pregel) river? Or should I try to visit the 14th-century Gothic cathedral? 

Perhaps later. As far as I’m concerned, the most important site of Kaliningrad is Kant’s modest tomb.

“ Immanuel Kant / 1724-1804 / Prominent bourgeois idealist philosopher. Born, lived without leaving, and died in Königsberg ”, read a Soviet-era plaque, placed there shortly after 1947, when the grave was surprisingly saved from demolition. At that time, Kaliningrad, which had been bombed during the war by both the British and the Soviets, was undergoing postwar reconstruction, with plans to turn it into a Soviet poster city, filled with Stalin statues and Lego-like purpose-built blocks. 

Kant’s tomb was saved by the miraculous intervention of one VV Lyubimov (most likely a false name) who wrote to Izvestia, the government’s official newspaper, to alert the authorities of the imminent danger to the philosopher’s grave. Kant, he wanted to remind them, had received a favourable mention in Dialectics of Nature by Friedrich Engels, who praised Kant’s “epoch-making work” for breaking with the “petrified”, theological view of nature. In a rare instance of responsiveness to democracy from below, the committee for cultural sites of the Council of Ministers decided to preserve Kant’s grave, and as a consequence the cathedral that contains it.

Since then, how authorities and the wider public engage with Kant and his thought, how they negotiate, appropriate — and to some extent distort — his legacy, have offered an interesting lens through which to explore some of the wider tensions of Russia’s relation to Europe and Europe’s relation to itself. 

In early July 2005, on the eve of the 750th anniversary of Kaliningrad-Königsberg, the local university took the name of Immanuel Kant. Russian president Vladimir Putin and then German chancellor Gerhard Schröder were both in attendance. There were enthusiastic speeches and vigorous handshakes. Kaliningrad, Schröder said, “is now the most western city of the Russian Federation”, and though this is still “painful for some, it is history”. The city had “a real chance to become a truly European metropolis, overcoming the borders that have been drawn”.

In subsuming the tragic past to a more hopeful future, one could hear echoes of the old doux commerce thesis: trade as the precondition to lasting peace. In Kaliningrad/Königsberg, Kant’s genius and spirit were invoked to seal that special union of German reason and Russian passion that became later known as Nord Stream 1 and 2.       

More recently, a presidential decree signed by Putin ordered the preparations for Kant’s 300th anniversary. A dedicated Russian website still reads: “Esteemed academics will gather in the city where professor Kant was born, lived, worked, and now rests, to discuss the philosopher’s legacy, the influence of his ideas on the progress of science and modern society.”

I am one of these academics. Or rather, I was. In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, and the international conference I was going to attend, the largest gathering of Kant scholars in the world, was moved to Germany. The event’s (now updated) webpage condemns Russia’s war of aggression, explaining that the decision to no longer travel to Kaliningrad was changed in the “justified assumption” that the congress “was acting in the interest of its members and the purpose of the association”.

I have recently found myself engaged in another thought experiment. Would Kant have cancelled his own congress in Kaliningrad? Judging by his reaction to Russia’s war of aggression against his own country at the end of the Seven Years’ War, it seems rather unlikely.

Although Kant was the first to come up with a definition of the Enlightenment captured under the motto “ Sapere aude! ” (“Have the courage of your own convictions”), the prominent 18th-century philosopher and author of the Critique of Pure Reason was not known for his acts of personal courage. In 1757, Königsberg was under Russian occupation and Kant wrote to Empress Elizabeth promising her his loyalty. In the case of treachery, he said, I will “inform the authorities forthwith, but also try to thwart the deed”. A chair in logic and metaphysics had recently become vacant and Kant needed the authorities’ support (he failed). 

Love for one’s nation should never be sacrificed to an ordinary academic chair, some might say. Still, cowardice may not be the only explanation for the inconsistency between the radical content of Kant’s writing and his more moderate personal behaviour. A deeper reason lies in the political requirements of his theory of freedom. 

To be free, in a Kantian sense, is to be able to take a critical distance from your passions and inclinations, and to ask yourself if they contribute to “enlightened” thinking: the exit, as Kant puts it, from “humanity’s self-incurred own immaturity”. The process of enlightenment rests on three maxims: to think for oneself, to think putting oneself in the place of everyone else, and to always think consistently. Such maxims, he believed, could be advanced through “the public use of reason”, a modus operandi that is fundamentally different from the “private” use people make of it in their professions (say as students, teachers, doctors, politicians, lawyers or asset managers). While the latter is premised on the acceptance of authority, the former requires pluralistic, impartial and critical engagement.

As conflicts threaten to expand, from Russia/Ukraine, and from Israel/Palestine, rereading Kant proves deeply troubling, but also instructive

It is difficult to relate to Kant’s aspirations in an age like ours where public-spiritedness is constantly threatened by the clash between private interests. Our mode of communication is wider and more inclusive than in the 18th century (for example, political participation is formally no longer limited to property-holders) but it is also shallower, more certain of itself and less critical. Dissent manifests itself more in clamorous acts of individual self-expression (preferably recorded on a mobile phone) and less in collective critical engagement. 

Like us, Kant lived in an age of crisis marked by great advances in science and technology but a collapse in values. Yet he carved out a role for reason as a universal communicative capacity that tries to steer a middle path between scepticism and dogmatism: between having faith in nothing and blindly following trends. That conception of reason seems harder to revive in our societies, strangled as they are between destructive interests and the individualisation of political commitment. 

On February 12 2024 , almost two years after Russia invaded Ukraine, Kaliningrad governor Anton Alikhanov declared at a conference that responsibility for the recent war lay with none other than the Enlightenment philosopher. Kant, Alikhanov emphasised, had a “direct relationship to the global chaos, the global realignment that we are now facing”; his works contributed to a “social and cultural situation” in which “the west has violated all agreements that had been reached”.

It was not the first time Kant attracted the ire of Russian nationalists. Already in December 2018, when the government conducted an online poll to rename Kaliningrad’s airport, Kant was a favourite until a smear campaign accusing him of being a “Russophobe” led to the vandalisation of his statue, paint thrown over his tomb, as well as the destruction of a commemorative plaque marking the site where he had lived.

Still, this time there was a tragic irony to Alikhanov’s words that Kant had a “direct connection to the military conflict in Ukraine”. Kant, after all, is better known as the author of one of the most famous anti-war essays written in the history of philosophy: “Toward Perpetual Peace”, published in 1795. As destructive conflicts threaten to expand their reach, from Russia/Ukraine to Europe, and from Israel/Palestine to the rest of the Middle East, rereading Kant proves deeply troubling, but perhaps also instructive.

The very title of the essay is inspired by the satirical engraving on a Dutch innkeeper’s board where “perpetual peace” refers to the calm of the “graveyard”. He never knew, of course, about nuclear threats. Still, his warning that “a war of extermination in which the simultaneous annihilation of both parties . . . would let perpetual peace come about only in the vast graveyard of the human race” has an eerie ring to it. 

The essay itself takes the form of an ideal peace treaty containing a series of articles to arrive not just at a provisional cessation of hostilities but the end of war once and for all. Kant criticises the ease with which states contract debt for the purpose of funding war. Debt, he suggests, is legitimate for peaceful projects but when it comes to international conflicts, money has a “dangerous power” because, “combined with politicians’ inclination to fight”, it “increases the facility to do so”.

The best-known paragraphs of Kant’s essay on perpetual peace are the ones that suggest how the rights of nations must be based on a “federalism between free states”. Kant’s proposal sought to address a challenge tormenting Europe since the “eternal peace” decree adopted at the 1495 Diet of Worms had led to a ban on private feuds common in the Middle Ages. What was the point of using the coercive power of the state to guarantee domestic peace, if the security of citizens was constantly threatened by international war? How should one handle warfare between larger units who now had a monopoly over the use of force?

For both Kant and Russell, pacifism does not simply amount to the position of ‘turning the other cheek’

Inspired by his predecessors’ efforts, including the Abbé de Saint Pierre’s proposal for a federation of European states that included Russia, Kant’s project was perhaps the most ambitious. The Prussian philosopher insisted that the standard 18th-century categories of private, public and international right must be complemented by a new one, which he labelled “cosmopolitan right”.

Grounded on human beings’ original common possession of the Earth, Kant’s cosmopolitanism involves the recognition of a “right” to visit everywhere without being treated with hostility. It also specifies that since global interaction has now gone so far that “a violation of right on one place of the Earth is felt in all ”, the concept of cosmopolitanism is not a question of ethics but politics. Since private, public, international and cosmopolitan right are interdependent, when one of them is questioned, the rest also collapse.                       

Kant was a pacifist, but he was not naive. In a well-known essay written in 1943 called “The Future of Pacifism”, the British philosopher Bertrand Russell distinguished between absolute and relative versions of the position. The former, Russell suggested, is the argument that “in all circumstances, it is wrong to take human life”. The latter, on the other hand, consists in the position that “the evils of war are almost always greater than they seem to excited populations at the moment when war breaks out”; and that while some wars were worth fighting, in cases such as the first world war the “evils resulting” were greater than the evils of making the concessions necessary to avert the war.

Kant’s system resists calculations of this sort: his pacifism is more about principles than consequences. Still, for both Kant and Russell, pacifism does not amount to the position of “turning the other cheek” held by the early Church fathers, and in response to which the Just War tradition developed. For advocates of Just War, turning the other cheek made sense only in the case of violence against individuals, not an attack in response to an entire group of innocent people. As Augustine, an early champion of Just War, put it, “it is the injustice of the opposing side that lays on the wise man the duty of waging just war”.

The position was as prominent among 18th-century jurists as it seems to be among 21st-century liberal politicians. In response to it, the sort of pacifism Kant proposed (and that inspired Russell) was part of a political argument. Pacifists are fully aware of the risks of appeasement and of the argument that a pacifist stance risks encouraging further aggressions. What they try to highlight is the danger of escalation and the historical rarity of wars that end with the total victory of only one side. 

Kant’s essay on perpetual peace is often cited as an inspiration for the European Union: a project born out of the ashes of the second world war that saw former mortal enemies come together in a shared commitment to peaceful institutions. For all its limitations, it has been crucial not just to steer western European politics away from fratricidal nationalism but also for disillusioned states struggling to reconcile with their communist past. 

Europe has recently become a place where the clash between good and evil are routinely invoked to justify acts of irresponsible brutality, and where the drums of war are heard ever more loudly. As governments across the world find themselves once again in an arms race, market shares in the military industry skyrocket.

Martial metaphors are everywhere: some find enemies inside Europe’s borders, agitating the spectre of a migrant threat to traditional values while openly advocating the extraterritorial deportation of asylum seekers. Others reckon with the prospect of enemies outside, urging us to “mentally prepare” for a “prewar era” as Polish prime minister Donald Tusk recently warned. Meanwhile, those who advocate compromise and nuance are exposed to ridicule and trolling at best, to censorship and repression at worst.

Nothing is further removed from the spirit of Kant than the dogmatic way in which we are asked to accept war in all its forms: political, social, cultural. Perhaps this is where the danger lies. Perhaps war is fought in the mind even before it reaches the ground. Perhaps we are being persuaded that good and bad are obvious, that right must prevail and wrong will be punished, that war — in the world of ideas, in politics, on our borders, on the front — is the only way forward.

In another possible world, I would have still travelled to Kaliningrad. I would have gone because I happen to agree with Kant that the only trenches we should join are those of reason. As one of the articles of “Perpetual Peace” insists, even in the middle of the worst excesses, some confidence in the humanity of the enemy must be maintained. If Kant has anything to teach us 300 years after his birth, it’s that when the pursuit of complete victory risks leading to complete extinction, escalation is always a disaster.

Lea Ypi is a professor of political theory at the London School of Economics and author of ‘Free: Coming of Age at the End of History’

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Essay on Peace: Need and Importance of Peace!

The issue of war and peace has always been a focal issue in all periods of history and at all levels relations among nations. The concern of the humankind for peace can be assessed by taking into account the fact that all religions, all religious scriptures and several religious ceremonies are committed to the cause of peace and all these advocate an elimination of war. The Shanti Path recited by the Hindus, the sermons of Pope and the commands of all the holy scriptures of the Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and all other communities hold out a sacred commitment to peace.

Yet the international community fully realized the supreme importance of the virtue of peace against the evil of war only after having suffered the most unfortunate and highly destructive two World Wars in the first half of the 20th century. The blood soaked shreds of humanity that lay scattered in several hundred battle grounds, particularly on the soils of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, cried for peace, peace and peace on the earth.

The UN Charter and International Peace and Security:

The human consciousness then rallied in the Charter of the United Nations to affirm. “We the people of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our life time has brought untold sorrow to humankind…. and to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security….. have resolved to combine our efforts to accomplish these aims.”

Since 1945, the United Nations and its specialized agencies, several international associations and institutions, international peace movements, global and national level human rights movements and in fact all members of the international community have been consistently and strongly advocating the need for the preservation and promotion of peace against war.

In contemporary times, the most urgent and important international objective has been to preserve protect and defend peace against terrorism and terrorist organizations like A1 Qacda, Talibans, and other enemies of peace.

How International Community has been trying to secure peace:

Through international peace keeping under the aegis of the United Nations through the development and use of international law; creation of more international and regional institutions committed to promote peace, promotion of friendly cooperation for development among the member countries; popularization of peaceful means of conflict-resolution, institutionalization of relations among nations; integration of international community through strengthening of human consciousness in favour of peace against war; and by enhancing the ability for crisis-management, the humankind has been trying to secure peace against war.

Currently, through:

(i) Globalization i.e. by encouraging the free flow of people goods, information services and knowledge;

(ii) Establishment of non-official people to people socio-economic-cultural relations;

(iii) Organisation of international peace movements against nuclear weapons, armament race, militarisation, and environmental pollution;

(iv) Launching of special drives for elimination of such evils as apartheid, poverty, illiteracy; ill-health, hunger, disease, inequalities, tyranny and terrorism; and

(v) organised attempts at environment protection and protection of Human Rights of all, the international community has been making meaningful attempts to limit the chances of war.

What is Peace?

One elementary way of defining peace has been to say that peace is absence of war. This is, however, a very narrow view of peace. No doubt absence of war is the first condition of peace, yet peace is not merely an absence of war. It is in reality a condition characterised by peaceful, cooperative and harmonious conduct of international relations with a view to secure all-round sustainable development of the people of the world.

Nevertheless, since absence of war is the first condition of peace, one of the major concerns of all scholars and statesmen has been to formulate and follow the principles and devices needed for securing this primary objective. The cold war that kept the world preoccupied during 1945-90, indirectly secured this objective in a negative way by developing a balance of terror in international relations.

While it was successful in preventing a global war, it failed to prevent local wars and in fact gave rise to several tensions, stresses, strains and crises in international relations. The international community had to work very hard for keeping the conflicts and wars limited. It, however, successfully exhibited a welcome and positive ability in the sphere of crisis-management.

In fact, till today there have been present several hindrances in way of securing a stable, healthy and enduring peace. Fortunately, the final end of cold war came in the last decade of the 20th century and the world found herself living is an environment characterised by a new faith and commitment to peace, peaceful co-existence, peaceful conflict-resolution, liberalisation, cooperation for development and attempts at sustainable development.

The people began focusing their attention on the need for the protection of human rights of all, protection of environment and securing of a real and meaningful international integration. However several negative factors, ethnic conflict, ethnic violence, ethnic wars, terrorism in its several dimensions, neo-colonialism, hegemony n-hegemony and the like kept on acting as big hindrances.

The need to secure peace by controlling these evils continues to be a primary aim of international community. Crises have been repeatedly coming and these are bound to keep coming. This makes it very urgent for the humankind to prepare and act for managing crises through collective efforts and by the use of several devices.

Related Articles:

• Does Peace Require Non-Violence?
• 8 Devices used for the Preservation of Peace

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Beyond Intractability

The Hyper-Polarization Challenge to the Conflict Resolution Field: A Joint BI/CRQ Discussion BI and the Conflict Resolution Quarterly invite you to participate in an online exploration of what those with conflict and peacebuilding expertise can do to help defend liberal democracies and encourage them live up to their ideals.

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By Michelle Maiese

September 2003  

What it Means to Build a Lasting Peace

It should be noted at the outset that there are two distinct ways to understand peacebuilding. According the United Nations (UN) document An Agenda for Peace [1], peacebuilding consists of a wide range of activities associated with capacity building, reconciliation , and societal transformation . Peacebuilding is a long-term process that occurs after violent conflict has slowed down or come to a halt. Thus, it is the phase of the peace process that takes place after peacemaking and peacekeeping.

Many non-governmental organizations (NGOs), on the other hand, understand peacebuilding as an umbrella concept that encompasses not only long-term transformative efforts, but also peacemaking and peacekeeping . In this view, peacebuilding includes early warning and response efforts, violence prevention , advocacy work, civilian and military peacekeeping , military intervention , humanitarian assistance , ceasefire agreements , and the establishment of peace zones.

In the interests of keeping these essays a reasonable length, this essay primarily focuses on the narrower use of the term "peacebuilding."  For more information about other phases of the peace process, readers should refer to the knowledge base essays about violence prevention , peacemaking and peacekeeping , as well as the essay on peace processes  which is what we use as our "umbrella" term.

In this narrower sense, peacebuilding is a process that facilitates the establishment of durable peace and tries to prevent the recurrence of violence by addressing root causes and effects of conflict through reconciliation , institution building, and political as well as economic transformation.[1] This consists of a set of physical, social, and structural initiatives that are often an integral part of post-conflict reconstruction and rehabilitation.

It is generally agreed that the central task of peacebuilding is to create positive peace, a "stable social equilibrium in which the surfacing of new disputes does not escalate into violence and war."[2] Sustainable peace is characterized by the absence of physical and structural violence , the elimination of discrimination, and self-sustainability.[3] Moving towards this sort of environment goes beyond problem solving or conflict management. Peacebuilding initiatives try to fix the core problems that underlie the conflict and change the patterns of interaction of the involved parties.[4] They aim to move a given population from a condition of extreme vulnerability and dependency to one of self-sufficiency and well-being.[5]

To further understand the notion of peacebuilding, many contrast it with the more traditional strategies of peacemaking and peacekeeping. Peacemaking is the diplomatic effort to end the violence between the conflicting parties, move them towards nonviolent dialogue, and eventually reach a peace agreement. Peacekeeping , on the other hand, is a third-party intervention (often, but not always done by military forces) to assist parties in transitioning from violent conflict to peace by separating the fighting parties and keeping them apart. These peacekeeping operations not only provide security, but also facilitate other non-military initiatives.[6]

Some draw a distinction between post-conflict peacebuilding and long-term peacebuilding. Post-conflict peacebuilding is connected to peacekeeping, and often involves demobilization and reintegration programs, as well as immediate reconstruction needs.[7] Meeting immediate needs and handling crises is no doubt crucial. But while peacemaking and peacekeeping processes are an important part of peace transitions, they are not enough in and of themselves to meet longer-term needs and build a lasting peace.

Long-term peacebuilding techniques are designed to fill this gap, and to address the underlying substantive issues that brought about conflict. Various transformation techniques aim to move parties away from confrontation and violence, and towards political and economic participation, peaceful relationships, and social harmony.[8]

This longer-term perspective is crucial to future violence prevention and the promotion of a more peaceful future. Thinking about the future involves articulating desirable structural, systemic, and relationship goals. These might include sustainable economic development, self-sufficiency, equitable social structures that meet human needs, and building positive relationships.[9]

Peacebuilding measures also aim to prevent conflict from reemerging. Through the creation of mechanisms that enhance cooperation and dialogue among different identity groups , these measures can help parties manage their conflict of interests through peaceful means. This might include building institutions that provide procedures and mechanisms for effectively handling and resolving conflict.[10] For example, societies can build fair courts, capacities for labor negotiation, systems of civil society reconciliation, and a stable electoral process.[11] Such designing of new dispute resolution systems is an important part of creating a lasting peace.

In short, parties must replace the spiral of violence and destruction with a spiral of peace and development, and create an environment conducive to self-sustaining and durable peace.[12] The creation of such an environment has three central dimensions: addressing the underlying causes of conflict, repairing damaged relationships and dealing with psychological trauma at the individual level. Each of these dimensions relies on different strategies and techniques.

The Structural Dimension: Addressing Root Causes

The structural dimension of peacebuilding focuses on the social conditions that foster violent conflict. Many note that stable peace must be built on social, economic, and political foundations that serve the needs of the populace.[13] In many cases, crises arise out of systemic roots. These root causes are typically complex, but include skewed land distribution, environmental degradation, and unequal political representation.[14] If these social problems are not addressed, there can be no lasting peace.

Thus, in order to establish durable peace, parties must analyze the structural causes of the conflict and initiate social structural change. The promotion of substantive and procedural justice through structural means typically involves institution building and the strengthening of civil society .

Avenues of political and economic transformation include social structural change to remedy political or economic injustice, reconstruction programs designed to help communities ravaged by conflict revitalize their economies, and the institution of effective and legitimate restorative justice systems.[15] Peacebuilding initiatives aim to promote nonviolent mechanisms that eliminate violence, foster structures that meet basic human needs , and maximize public participation .[16]

To provide fundamental services to its citizens, a state needs strong executive, legislative, and judicial institutions.[17] Many point to democratization as a key way to create these sorts of peace-enhancing structures. Democratization seeks to establish legitimate and stable political institutions and civil liberties that allow for meaningful competition for political power and broad participation in the selection of leaders and policies.[18] It is important for governments to adhere to principles of transparency and predictability, and for laws to be adopted through an open and public process.[19] For the purpose of post-conflict peacebuilding, the democratization process should be part of a comprehensive project to rebuild society's institutions.

Political structural changes focus on political development, state building , and the establishment of effective government institutions. This often involves election reform, judicial reform, power-sharing initiatives, and constitutional reform. It also includes building political parties, creating institutions that provide procedures and mechanisms for effectively handling and resolving conflict, and establishing mechanisms to monitor and protect human rights . Such institution building and infrastructure development typically requires the dismantling, strengthening, or reformation of old institutions in order to make them more effective.

It is crucial to establish and maintain rule of law, and to implement rules and procedures that constrain the powers of all parties and hold them accountable for their actions.[20] This can help to ease tension, create stability, and lessen the likelihood of further conflict. For example, an independent judiciary can serve as a forum for the peaceful resolution of disputes and post-war grievances.[21]

In addition, societies need a system of criminal justice that deters and punishes banditry and acts of violence.[22] Fair police mechanisms must be established and government officials and members of the police force must be trained to observe basic rights in the execution of their duties.[23] In addition, legislation protecting minorities and laws securing gender equality should be advanced. Courts and police forces must be free of corruption and discrimination.

But structural change can also be economic. Many note that economic development is integral to preventing future conflict and avoiding a relapse into violence.[24] Economic factors that put societies at risk include lack of employment opportunities, food scarcity, and lack of access to natural resources or land. A variety of social structural changes aim to eliminate the structural violence that arises out of a society's economic system. These economic and social reforms include economic development programs, health care assistance, land reform, social safety nets, and programs to promote agricultural productivity.[25]

Economic peacebuilding targets both the micro- and macro-level and aims to create economic opportunities and ensure that the basic needs of the population are met. On the microeconomic level, societies should establish micro-credit institutions to increase economic activity and investment at the local level, promote inter-communal trade and an equitable distribution of land, and expand school enrollment and job training.[26] On the macroeconomic level, the post-conflict government should be assisted in its efforts to secure the economic foundations and infrastructure necessary for a transition to peace.[27]

The Relational Dimension

A second integral part of building peace is reducing the effects of war-related hostility through the repair and transformation of damaged relationships. The relational dimension of peacebuilding centers on reconciliation , forgiveness , trust building , and future imagining . It seeks to minimize poorly functioning communication and maximize mutual understanding.[28]

Many believe that reconciliation is one of the most effective and durable ways to transform relationships and prevent destructive conflicts.[29] The essence of reconciliation is the voluntary initiative of the conflicting parties to acknowledge their responsibility and guilt. Parties reflect upon their own role and behavior in the conflict, and acknowledge and accept responsibility for the part they have played. As parties share their experiences, they learn new perspectives and change their perception of their "enemies." There is recognition of the difficulties faced by the opposing side and of their legitimate grievances, and a sense of empathy begins to develop. Each side expresses sincere regret and remorse, and is prepared to apologize for what has transpired. The parties make a commitment to let go of anger , and to refrain from repeating the injury. Finally, there is a sincere effort to redress past grievances and compensate for the damage done. This process often relies on interactive negotiation and allows the parties to enter into a new mutually enriching relationship.[30]

One of the essential requirements for the transformation of conflicts is effective communication and negotiation at both the elite and grassroots levels . Through both high- and community-level dialogues , parties can increase their awareness of their own role in the conflict and develop a more accurate perception of both their own and the other group's identity .[31] As each group shares its unique history, traditions, and culture, the parties may come to understand each other better. International exchange programs and problem-solving workshops are two techniques that can help to change perceptions, build trust , open communication , and increase empathy .[32] For example, over the course of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the main antagonists have sometimes been able to build trust through meeting outside their areas , not for formal negotiations, but simply to better understand each other.[33]

If these sorts of bridge-building communication systems are in place, relations between the parties can improve and any peace agreements they reach will more likely be self-sustaining.[34] (The Israeli-Palestinian situation illustrates that there are no guarantees, however.) Various mass communication and education measures, such as peace radio and TV , peace-education projects , and conflict-resolution training , can help parties to reach such agreements.[35] And dialogue between people of various ethnicities or opposing groups can lead to deepened understanding and help to change the demonic image of the enemy group.[36] It can also help parties to overcome grief, fear, and mistrust and enhance their sense of security.

A crucial component of such dialogue is future imaging , whereby parties form a vision of the commonly shared future they are trying to build. Conflicting parties often have more in common in terms of their visions of the future than they do in terms of their shared and violent past.[37] The thought is that if they know where they are trying to go, it will be easier to get there.

Another way for the parties to build a future together is to pursue joint projects that are unrelated to the conflict's core issues and center on shared interests. This can benefit the parties' relationship. Leaders who project a clear and hopeful vision of the future and the ways and means to get there can play a crucial role here.

But in addition to looking towards the future, parties must deal with their painful past. Reconciliation not only envisions a common, connected future, but also recognizes the need to redress past wrongdoing.[38] If the parties are to renew their relationship and build an interdependent future, what has happened must be exposed and then forgiven .

Indeed, a crucial part of peacebuilding is addressing past wrongdoing while at the same time promoting healing and rule of law.[39] Part of repairing damaged relationships is responding to past human rights violations and genocide through the establishment of truth commissions , fact-finding missions, and war crimes tribunals .[40] These processes attempt to deal with the complex legal and emotional issues associated with human rights abuses and ensure that justice is served. It is commonly thought that past injustice must be recognized, and the perpetrators punished if parties wish to achieve reconciliation.

However, many note that the retributive justice advanced by Western legal systems often ignores the needs of victims and exacerbates wounds.[41] Many note that to advance healing between the conflicting parties, justice must be more reparative in focus. Central to restorative justice is its future-orientation and its emphasis on the relationship between victims and offenders. It seeks to engage both victims and offenders in dialogue and make things right by identifying their needs and obligations.[42] Having community-based restorative justice processes in place can help to build a sustainable peace.

The Personal Dimension

The personal dimension of peacebuilding centers on desired changes at the individual level. If individuals are not able to undergo a process of healing, there will be broader social, political, and economic repercussions.[43] The destructive effects of social conflict must be minimized, and its potential for personal growth must be maximized.[44] Reconstruction and peacebuilding efforts must prioritize treating mental health problems and integrate these efforts into peace plans and rehabilitation efforts.

In traumatic situations, a person is rendered powerless and faces the threat of death and injury. Traumatic events might include a serious threat or harm to one's family or friends, sudden destruction of one's home or community, and a threat to one's own physical being.[45] Such events overwhelm an individual's coping resources, making it difficult for the individual to function effectively in society.[46] Typical emotional effects include depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. After prolonged and extensive trauma, a person is often left with intense feelings that negatively influence his/her psychological well-being. After an experience of violence, an individual is likely to feel vulnerable, helpless, and out of control in a world that is unpredictable.[47]

Building peace requires attention to these psychological and emotional layers of the conflict. The social fabric that has been destroyed by war must be repaired, and trauma must be dealt with on the national, community, and individual levels.[48] At the national level, parties can accomplish widespread personal healing through truth and reconciliation commissions that seek to uncover the truth and deal with perpetrators. At the community level, parties can pay tribute to the suffering of the past through various rituals or ceremonies, or build memorials to commemorate the pain and suffering that has been endured.[49] Strong family units that can rebuild community structures and moral environments are also crucial.

At the individual level, one-on-one counseling has obvious limitations when large numbers of people have been traumatized and there are insufficient resources to address their needs. Peacebuilding initiatives must therefore provide support for mental health infrastructure and ensure that mental health professionals receive adequate training. Mental health programs should be adapted to suit the local context, and draw from traditional and communal practice and customs wherever possible.[50] Participating in counseling and dialogue can help individuals to develop coping mechanisms and to rebuild their trust in others.[51]

If it is taken that psychology drives individuals' attitudes and behaviors, then new emphasis must be placed on understanding the social psychology of conflict and its consequences. If ignored, certain victims of past violence are at risk for becoming perpetrators of future violence.[52] Victim empowerment and support can help to break this cycle.

Peacebuilding Agents

Peacebuilding measures should integrate civil society in all efforts and include all levels of society in the post-conflict strategy. All society members, from those in elite leadership positions, to religious leaders, to those at the grassroots level, have a role to play in building a lasting peace. Many apply John Paul Lederach's model of hierarchical intervention levels to make sense of the various levels at which peacebuilding efforts occur.[53]

Because peace-building measures involve all levels of society and target all aspects of the state structure, they require a wide variety of agents for their implementation. These agents advance peace-building efforts by addressing functional and emotional dimensions in specified target areas, including civil society and legal institutions.[54] While external agents can facilitate and support peacebuilding, ultimately it must be driven by internal forces. It cannot be imposed from the outside.

Various internal actors play an integral role in peacebuilding and reconstruction efforts. The government of the affected country is not only the object of peacebuilding, but also the subject. While peacebuilding aims to transform various government structures, the government typically oversees and engages in this reconstruction process. A variety of the community specialists, including lawyers, economists, scholars, educators, and teachers, contribute their expertise to help carry out peacebuilding projects. Finally, a society's religious networks can play an important role in establishing social and moral norms.[55]

Nevertheless, outside parties typically play a crucial role in advancing such peacebuilding efforts. Few peacebuilding plans work unless regional neighbors and other significant international actors support peace through economic development aid and humanitarian relief .[56] At the request of the affected country, international organizations can intervene at the government level to transform established structures.[57] They not only provide monetary support to post-conflict governments, but also assist in the restoration of financial and political institutions. Because their efforts carry the legitimacy of the international community, they can be quite effective.

Various institutions provide the necessary funding for peacebuilding projects. While international institutions are the largest donors, private foundations contribute a great deal through project-based financing.[58] In addition, regional organizations often help to both fund and implement peacebuilding strategies. Finally, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) often carry out small-scale projects to strengthen countries at the grassroots level. Not only traditional NGOs but also the business and academic community and various grassroots organizations work to further these peace-building efforts. All of the groups help to address "the limits imposed on governmental action by limited resources, lack of consensus, or insufficient political will."[59]

Some suggest that governments, NGOs, and intergovernmental agencies need to create categories of funding related to conflict transformation and peacebuilding.[60] Funds are often difficult to secure when they are intended to finance preventive action. And middle-range initiatives, infrastructure building, and grassroots projects do not typically attract significant funding, even though these sorts of projects may have the greatest potential to sustain long-term conflict transformation.[61] Those providing resources for peacebuilding initiatives must look to fill these gaps. In addition, external actors must think through the broader ramifications of their programs.[62] They must ensure that funds are used to advance genuine peacebuilding initiatives rather than be swallowed up by corrupt leaders or channeled into armed conflict.

But as already noted, higher-order peace, connected to improving local capacities, is not possible simply through third-party intervention.[63] And while top-down approaches are important, peace must also be built from the bottom up. Many top-down agreements collapse because the ground below has not been prepared. Top-down approaches must therefore be buttressed, and relationships built.

Thus, an important task in sustaining peace is to build a peace constituency within the conflict setting. Middle-range actors form the core of a peace constituency. They are more flexible than top-level leaders, and less vulnerable in terms of daily survival than those at the grassroots level.[64] Middle-range actors who strive to build bridges to their counterparts across the lines of conflict are the ones best positioned to sustain conflict transformation. This is because they have an understanding of the nuances of the conflict setting, as well as access to the elite leadership .

Many believe that the greatest resource for sustaining peace in the long term is always rooted in the local people and their culture.[65] Parties should strive to understand the cultural dimension of conflict, and identify the mechanisms for handling conflict that exist within that cultural setting. Building on cultural resources and utilizing local mechanisms for handling disputes can be quite effective in resolving conflicts and transforming relationships. Initiatives that incorporate citizen-based peacebuilding include community peace projects in schools and villages, local peace commissions and problem-solving workshops , and a variety of other grassroots initiatives .

Effective peacebuilding also requires public-private partnerships in addressing conflict and greater coordination among the various actors.[66] International governmental organizations, national governments, bilateral donors, and international and local NGOs need to coordinate to ensure that every dollar invested in peacebuilding is spent wisely.[67] To accomplish this, advanced planning and intervention coordination is needed.

There are various ways to attempt to coordinate peace-building efforts. One way is to develop a peace inventory to keep track of which agents are doing various peace-building activities. A second is to develop clearer channels of communication and more points of contact between the elite and middle ranges. In addition, a coordination committee should be instituted so that agreements reached at the top level are actually capable of being implemented.[68] A third way to better coordinate peace-building efforts is to create peace-donor conferences that bring together representatives from humanitarian organizations, NGOs, and the concerned governments. It is often noted that "peacebuilding would greatly benefit from cross-fertilization of ideas and expertise and the bringing together of people working in relief, development, conflict resolution, arms control, diplomacy, and peacekeeping."[69] Lastly, there should be efforts to link internal and external actors. Any external initiatives must also enhance the capacity of internal resources to build peace-enhancing structures that support reconciliation efforts throughout a society.[70] In other words, the international role must be designed to fit each case.

[1] Boutros-Ghali, Boutros. An Agenda for Peace. New York: United Nations 1995 .

[1a] SAIS, "The Conflict Management Toolkit: Approaches," The Conflict Management Program, Johns Hopkins University [available at: http://www.sais-jhu.edu/resources/middle-east-studies/conflict-management-toolkit

[2] Henning Haugerudbraaten, "Peacebuilding: Six Dimensions and Two Concepts," Institute For Security Studies. [available at: http://www.iss.co.za/Pubs/ASR/7No6/Peacebuilding.html ]

[3] Luc Reychler, "From Conflict to Sustainable Peacebuilding: Concepts and Analytical Tools," in Peacebuilding: A Field Guide , Luc Reychler and Thania Paffenholz, eds. (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc., 2001), 12.

[4] Reychler, 12.

[5] John Paul Lederach, Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies . (Washington, D.C., United States Institute of Peace, 1997), 75.

[6] SAIS, [available at: http://www.sais-jhu.edu/resources/middle-east-studies/conflict-management-toolkit ]

[7] Michael Doyle and Nicholas Sambanis. "Building Peace: Challenges and Strategies After Civil War," The World Bank Group. [available at: http://www.chs.ubc.ca/srilanka/PDFs/Building%20peace--challenges%20and%20strategies.pdf ] 3.

[8] Doyle and Sambanis, 2

[9] Lederach, 77.

[11] Doyle and Sambanis, 5.

[13] Haugerudbraaten

[14] Haugerudbraaten

[16] Lederach, 83.

[19] Neil J. Kritz, "The Rule of Law in the Post-Conflict Phase: Building a Stable Peace," in Managing Global Chaos: Sources or and Responses to International Conflict , eds. Chester A. Crocker and Fen Osler Hampson with Pamela Aall. (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1996), 593.

[20] Kritz, 588.

[21] Kritz, 591.

[22] Kritz, 591.

[25] Michael Lund, "A Toolbox for Responding to Conflicts and Building Peace," In Peacebuilding: A Field Guide , Luc Reychler and Thania Paffenholz, eds. (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Reinner Publishers, Inc., 2001), 18.

[27] These issues are discussed in detail in the set of essays on development in this knowledge base.

[28] Lederach, 82.

[29] Hizkias Assefa, "Reconciliation," in Peacebuilding: A Field Guide , Luc Reychler and Thania Paffenholz, eds. (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Reinner Publishers, Inc., 2001), 342.

[30] Assefa, 340.

[33] Kathleen Stephens, "Building Peace in Deeply Rooted Conflicts: Exploring New Ideas to Shape the Future" INCORE, 1997.

[34] Reychler, 13.

[35] Lund, 18.

[37] Lederach, 77.

[38] Lederach, 31.

[39] Howard Zehr, "Restorative Justice," In Peacebuilding: A Field Guide , Luc Reychler and Thania Paffenholz, eds. (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Reinner Publishers, Inc., 2001), 330.

[41] Zehr, 330.

[42] Zehr, 331.

[44] Lederach, 82.

[45] Hugo van der Merwe and Tracy Vienings, "Coping with Trauma," in Peacebuilding: A Field Guide, Luc Reychler and Thania Paffenholz, eds. (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Reinner Publishers, Inc., 2001), 343.

[46] van der Merwe, 343.

[47] van der Merwe, 345.

[48] van der Merwe, 343.

[49] van der Merwe, 344.

[51] van der Merwe, 347.

[52] van der Merwe, 344.

[53] John Paul Lederach, Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies, Chapter 4.

[56] Doyle and Sambanis, 18.

[59] Stephens.

[60] Lederach, 89.

[61] Lederach, 92.

[62] Lederach, 91.

[63] Doyle and Sambanis, 25.

[64] Lederach, 94.

[65] Lederach, 94.

[66] Stephens.

[67] Doyle and Sambanis, 23.

[68] Lederach, 100.

[69] Lederach, 101.

[70] Lederach, 103.

Use the following to cite this article: Maiese, Michelle. "Peacebuilding." Beyond Intractability . Eds. Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess. Conflict Information Consortium, University of Colorado, Boulder. Posted: September 2003 < http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/peacebuilding >.

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Essay on Peace And Development

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100 Words Essay on Peace And Development

What is peace.

Peace is when people live without fighting, fear, or stress. It’s like a big family where everyone gets along. In a peaceful place, kids can play, go to school, and dream about their future without worry.

What is Development?

Development means making things better for everyone. It’s like helping a tiny seed grow into a big, strong tree. Development can be building schools, hospitals, and roads, or making sure all people have enough food and clean water.

Peace Helps Development

When there’s peace, it’s easier to build things and make lives better. Without fighting, countries can focus on helping people learn, stay healthy, and have good jobs. Peace is like sunshine for development; it helps it grow.

Development Supports Peace

Development makes people happier because they have what they need, like education and health. When everyone has a chance to succeed, they are less likely to fight. So, building a better world also builds peace.

Working Together

Peace and development are best friends. They work together to create a world where kids and grown-ups can live happily. By sharing and caring, we can make sure everyone has a chance to live in peace and grow strong.

250 Words Essay on Peace And Development

Understanding peace and development.

Peace and development are two big words that mean a lot for every country. Imagine a place where there is no fighting and everyone is working together to make life better. This is the dream of peace and development. When a country is peaceful, it means that people are not hurting each other, and everyone feels safe. Development means growing in a good way, like having better schools, hospitals, and roads.

The Link Between Peace and Development

Peace and development are like best friends. They need each other to do well. If a place is peaceful, it is easier for it to grow. Companies can build factories, people can go to work, and children can learn in schools without being scared. On the other hand, when a country is growing well, people are happier because they have jobs and can take care of their families, which helps keep peace.

Why Peace Matters for Growth

When there is no peace, it is hard for a place to grow. Fights can destroy buildings and make people run away from their homes. This means businesses can’t work well, and kids might not be able to go to school. So, keeping peace is very important for any country to become better and help its people live good lives.

Working Together for a Better Future

To have peace and development, everyone has to work together. Governments, people, and groups from different countries can help each other to make sure everyone lives in peace and has a chance to grow. When we all help each other, we can build a world where every person has a good life, with education, health, and happiness.

500 Words Essay on Peace And Development

Peace and development are like two sides of the same coin. When we talk about peace, we mean the absence of war or fighting. Development is about growth and making life better for people. For a society to grow and for its people to live well, it is important that there is no violence or war.

Why Peace Matters

Imagine trying to study or play when there is noise and chaos around you. It’s hard, right? The same goes for a country. Without peace, it’s difficult for any country to focus on building schools, hospitals, or roads. People need to feel safe to go to work, children need to go to school, and for all this to happen, peace is necessary.

The Role of Development

Development is about improving the lives of people. It includes things like good education, healthcare, clean water, and opportunities to work. When people have access to these things, they can lead happier and healthier lives. Development helps in reducing poverty, and when people are not poor, they tend to fight less with each other.

Peace Brings More Development

When a country is peaceful, it can spend its money on building things that make life better instead of spending it on weapons or soldiers. Companies are more likely to invest in places where there is no fighting. This means more jobs and money for the people. Also, tourists like to visit peaceful places, which brings even more money.

Development Brings More Peace

On the other hand, when people’s lives are getting better, they usually do not want to fight. If people have good jobs, they want to keep them. If their children are going to school, they want them to learn in peace. So, development can help in keeping the peace because people are busy working on their dreams and they have less reason to fight.

Challenges in Achieving Peace and Development

Even though we know how important peace and development are, achieving them is not always easy. Sometimes, people fight over things like land, money, or power. Other times, natural disasters or diseases can destroy all the hard work done towards development. It takes a lot of effort from everyone – leaders, citizens, and even other countries – to overcome these challenges.

Working Together for a Better World

To have a world where there is peace and development, everyone needs to work together. Governments need to make fair rules and ensure that everyone follows them. People need to respect each other and solve their problems without fighting. Organizations from around the world can help by giving money, advice, or other help to countries that need it.

In conclusion, peace and development go hand in hand. Without peace, it’s hard to build a better life for people, and without development, it’s hard to keep peace. It’s like planting a garden. You need the right conditions for the plants to grow. If we all do our part in creating these conditions, we can enjoy the beauty of a peaceful and developed world.

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• Essay on Peace
• Essay on Patriotism And Nationalism
• Essay on Patience Is A Virtue

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A short essay on peace

Peace is one of the important human values. It refers to silence or reconcilement. It means to live together in harmony. Without it, society can't progress. It is very necessary for the growth of society as well as a nation. Peace is similar to nonviolence. This article describes how it is important for the nation as well as society.

Introduction Peace is a human need. Maintaining peace of mind helps us to achieve goals in our life. Peace is the way for bringing growth and prosperity in life. If there is peace in every human's mind then this world will go on peacefully. Without peace, any kind of development is impossible. Peace is vital for the survival of human beings. According to Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru's words " peace is a precious commodity, necessary for any progress". Right from the beginning, we Indians are fond of peace. Whenever war happened in any country, we tried to solve problems through peace. Nowadays, It is not an easy task to maintain peace as new generation people believe in violence. As you know in our country multilingual and multi-religion people reside still we live together happily. But in another country, the condition is not favourable. In a European country, there is much bias between black men and white men. They are never treated equally. But in India, we provide equality to every people irrespective of caste, creed and religion. In our country, Mahatma Gandhi was against violence and believed in peace only. He wanted to get independence with peace. He used to preach to the people if someone slaps you on one cheek then you should forward the other cheek to take another slap which means he was a very peace-loving human being. Besides, The Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa, and Saint Francis de Sales are known as peace idols. They tried to make this world understand that peace is the strength of mind. We can conquer this world through peace only. War always brings destruction in life. Nobody can be happy by violence. Oftentimes you would be felt that we could not do work due to a lack of peace. Peace is necessary not only for progress in life but for good health also. A peaceful mind can do good work. If you create a peaceful environment then only work will happen properly. Peace helps us in preventing violence. Why peace is Important for society? Peace is important because it brings unity, optimism, and collaboration among society. Peace increases our concentration of mind. when our mind is in peace position then we are not affected by other people what they think about us. A peaceful mind helps us in learning and understanding things faster. Peace keeps us mentally and physically fit. Peace provides strength to society. Peace brings brotherhood, happiness, and integrity to society. Peace develops job opportunities in society. No society can exist without peace. Conclusion Peace is the accurate way to maintain love in society. Peace is essential for protecting our society from being damaged. Peace can make our nation healthy, wealthy, and strong. Without peace, It is impossible to imagine a prosperous and developed nation. Peace can be achieved only by mutual understanding. And It is the responsibility of every person to maintain peace in society.

True. peace is a very important virtue one should have. When there is peace in and around. our mind will be pleasant and we work very efficiently. Without peace, progress is very difficult. The main reason for our country not developing fully is due to the lack of peace in the country. Our country is having some neighbouring countries who always try to create unrest and disturb the situation in the country. Because of these acts we have to be alert always which is taking away peace from us. If we have friendly neighbours we need not spend such a huge amount on defence and that money might have been used on the development of the country. Even in such adverse conditions also, we tried to maintain peace and tried to make agreements with the neighbouring countries. In such attempts, we have lost great leaders like Lal Bahadur Shastri. When there is peace around we will be happy and the whole environment around us will be pleasant. But many politicians try to disturb peace in the society by creating a difference between the people so that they will get importance.

Peace is an elusive entity. Since time immortal from the dawn of civilization our leaders, scholars, and saints had always preached about peace and tried to achieve it in this world but it always seemed to be difficult to achieve peace in totality among the various tribes and societies existing in the world. There could be many reasons for not having peace in this world but some of the main reasons are attributable to the difference in cultures, difference in religions, difference in ideology, and difference in the way the different societies live and aspire to expand their own kingdoms or country boundaries. Ambitions and aspirations for winning on other countries and ruling over them is the root cause of creating disturbance and unrest in this world. Though number of such invaders might be less in the world in comparison to the peaceful people but small number of bad people is enough to spoil the atmosphere throughout the globe. So this is a very difficult situation where most of the people in the world are peace loving but at the same time there are few pockets where some terrorists or ill minded people live and are creating all source of problems for the people all around the world. These ill minded people are stubborn in their thinking and approach to the other societies and are beyond repair in the sense that even after teaching and explaining them the modern way and modern life of living they do not agree to that proposition and remain in their mindset of fighting and attacking others.

In this run-of-the-mill world, every country has become so engrossed in proving itself as the top that it does not even realize that humanity and peaceful life are being lost in the meaningless disputes between countries over borders and land, etc. . The person who wants to live in peace is also sacrificing his life in these disputes and the peace is lost. Thinking about one's own progress is a natural common behavior, but it is wrong to prove oneself high by destroying the interests of others or their religions and the same is happening in some parts of the world. India is really a great example, where people of different religions and cultures live together in brotherhood, give respect to each other. When a person thinks about the interests of others along with himself and is also happy with the happiness of others, then his life automatically becomes peaceful and people who live such a peaceful life become a symbol of peace in the society as well.

Yes, very nicely define the theme of peace by the Author. All our sages have preached the message of peace. Because they realized how important the need for peace is for a nation. We have at least learned something from them, so at least as Indians we are proud of it. In this context, the words of the seven sages are not to be forgotten. The modern famous personnel in India also teaches us the words of peace. The names of Gandhiji, Mother Teresa, Vivekananda, etc. are significant. Some of their quotes are very much relevant at the present situation like- “An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind" by Gandhiji, “Peace and war begin at home. If we truly want peace in the world, let us begin by loving one another in our own families. If we want to spread joy, we need for every family to have joy" by Mother Tressa, and “It is a privilege to serve mankind, for this is the worship of God. God is here, in all these human souls" by Swami Vivekanand. So peace makes everyone happy both physically and spiritually. In the modern world, the word peace is so important in recent times, it is my personal opinion that there has been a communal intolerance all over the world, the consequences of which could be horrific. Moreover, with the recent withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, the Taliban have taken over Kabul and we are witnessing various acts of violence, which are never desirable. So above all this is the place of peace, so it is possible to solve all this only through the proper application of the message of peace. When can we all forget the violence and go to peace?

Nice try from the author and the subject matter is very strong. The essence of everyone's life is to live in peace and no one wants to get disturbed or distracted from the peace of life. Whoever has attained wisdom in life have always advocated for peace and those who are saints and scholars always referred to the holy books citing peace as the main plank of living in harmony. Lord Krishna has played a major role in trying to avert the possible Kurukshetra war and just asked for five villages in the name of Pandavas but that could not be digested by Duryodhana and thus the great war was announced. Even our country is for wholesome peace in the region and does not tolerate the overtures of China and Pakistan. As long as human beings stay, peace is going to stay as what they want the most.

Peace within can create peace outside the world. The other way around is not possible. However, the irony is that despite knowing that we have to create it to experience it, we keep looking for it outside. It is just that we have forgotten how to be peaceful. When we realize that we are peaceful, we will experience stillness within us. We will come at peace with ourselves and at ease with ourselves. When we discover it, we will not be able to again get distracted no matter how many efforts others make to bring disturbance into our lives. As we have forgotten that we can create it and experience it, we feel that it is others who will bring it for us. We have made it dependent on others. When someone speaks loudly and creates chaos, we blame him for disturbing our peace. We don't want to do the inner work because it is difficult. Also, it requires us to take personal responsibility. When we are disturbed, it denotes that we failed to remain at peace. We don't want to admit it, and therefore, we lay the responsibility on another person.

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Guest Essay

A Dangerous Game Is Underway in Asia

By Mike M. Mochizuki and Michael D. Swaine

Dr. Mochizuki is a professor at George Washington University. Dr. Swaine is a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

This month, President Biden threw one of the most lavish state dinners in Washington’s recent memory. Celebrities and billionaires flocked to the White House to dine in honor of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan, posing for photos in front of an elaborate display of Japanese fans. Jeff Bezos dropped by; Paul Simon provided the entertainment.

The spectacle was part of a carefully orchestrated series of events to showcase the renewed U.S.-Japan relationship — and the notable transformation of the United States’ security alliances in Asia. The next day, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. of the Philippines was also in the U.S. capital for a historic U.S.-Japan-Philippines summit, during which a new trilateral security partnership was announced.

Both events were directed at the same audience: China.

Over the past several years, Washington has built a series of multilateral security arrangements like these in the Asia-Pacific region. Although U.S. officials claim that the recent mobilization of allies and partners is not aimed at China, don’t believe it. Indeed, Mr. Kishida emphasized in a speech to Congress on April 11 that China presents “the greatest strategic challenge” both to Japan and to the international community.

China’s recent activity is, of course, concerning. Its military has acquired ever more potent ways to counter U.S. and allied capabilities in the Western Pacific and has behaved aggressively in the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait and elsewhere, alarming its neighbors.

But Washington’s pursuit of an increasingly complex lattice of security ties is a dangerous game. Those ties include upgrades in defense capabilities, more joint military exercises, deeper intelligence sharing, new initiatives on defense production and technology cooperation and the enhancement of contingency planning and military coordination. All of that may make Beijing more cautious about the blatant use of military force in the region. But the new alliance structure is not, on its own, a long-term guarantor of regional peace and stability — and could even increase the risk of stumbling into a conflict.

The security partnership rolled out this month in Washington is only the latest in a string of new defense configurations that reach across Asia and the Pacific. In 2017 the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, known as the Quad, was revived, promoting collaboration among the United States, Japan, Australia and India. In September 2021, Australia, Britain and the United States began their partnership, known as AUKUS, and the United States, Japan and South Korea committed to closer cooperation in a summit at Camp David last August.

All of these moves have been motivated primarily by concern over Beijing, which has, in turn, castigated these countries as being part of a U.S.-led effort to create an Asian version of NATO designed to contain China. None amount to a collective defense pact like the NATO treaty, whose Article 5 considers an armed attack on one member as “an attack against them all.” But China will nevertheless almost certainly regard the latest agreement among the United States, Japan and the Philippines — with which it is engaged in an active territorial dispute — as further confirmation of a Washington-led attempt to threaten its interests.

It’s not yet clear how Beijing will respond. But it may double down on the expansion of its military capabilities and intensify its use of military and paramilitary force to assert its territorial claims in the region, especially regarding the sensitive issue of Taiwan. Beijing could also promote further Chinese military cooperation with Russia in the form of enhanced military exercises and deployments.

The net result may be an Asia-Pacific region that is even more divided and dangerous than it is today, marked by a deepening arms race. In this increasingly contentious and militarized environment, the chance of some political incident or military accident triggering a devastating regional war is likely to grow. This is especially likely, given the absence of meaningful U.S. and allied crisis communication channels with China to prevent such an incident from spiraling out of control.

To prevent this nightmare, the U.S. and its allies and partners must invest much more in diplomacy with China, in addition to bolstering military deterrence.

For a start, the United States and key allies like Japan should make a sustained effort to establish a durable crisis prevention and management dialogue with China involving each nation’s foreign policy and security agencies. So far, such dialogues have been limited primarily to military channels and topics. It is critical that both civilian and military officials understand the many possible sources of inadvertent crises and develop ways to prevent them or manage them if they occur. This process should include the establishment of an agreed-upon set of leaders’ best practices for crisis management and a trusted but unofficial channel through which the relevant parties can discuss crisis-averting understandings.

The immediate focus for the United States and Japan should be on avoiding actions that add to tensions across the Taiwan Strait. The deployment of American military trainers to Taiwan on what looks like a permanent basis and suggestions by some U.S. officials and policy analysts that Taiwan be treated as a security linchpin within the overall U.S. defense posture in Asia are needlessly provocative. They also openly contradict America’s longstanding “one China” policy , under which the United States ended the deployment of all U.S. military forces to Taiwan and does not view Taiwan as a key U.S. security location, caring only that the Taiwan issue be handled peacefully and without coercion.

Japan, for its part, has also become more circumspect about its own “one China” policy by being reluctant to reaffirm explicitly that Tokyo does not support Taiwan’s independence. Recent statements by some political leaders in Tokyo about Japanese military forces being ready to help defend Taiwan will almost certainly inflame Chinese leaders, who remember that Japan seized Taiwan after the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 and ’95.

Washington and Tokyo should clearly reaffirm their previous commitments on the China-Taiwan dispute. Tokyo also should confirm that it does not support any unilateral move by Taiwan toward independence and resist U.S. efforts to compel Japan to commit to Taiwan’s defense. Although American officials have reportedly been prodding Japan to join military planning for a Taiwan conflict, a large majority of Japanese residents do not favor fighting to defend Taiwan. Tokyo can best contribute to deterring China by focusing on strengthening its ability to defend its own islands.

Washington and its allies should shift to a more positive approach to China, aimed at fostering accommodation and restraint. This could include working to secure credible mutual assurances regarding limits on Chinese military deployments, such as amphibious forces and missile capabilities relevant to Taiwan, in return for U.S. limits on the levels and types of arms that it sells to the island. They could also explore increasing security cooperation with China regarding cyberattacks, the defense of sea lanes and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, as well as better collaboration to combat climate change and the outbreak of another pandemic.

China, of course, has its own role to play. In the end, Beijing, like the United States, wants to avoid a crisis and conflict in the region. Given that, it should respond to a more cooperative American and allied approach by moderating its own coercive behavior regarding maritime disputes.

None of this will be easy, given the intense suspicion that now exists between Beijing and Washington and its allies. But new thinking and new diplomatic efforts could incentivize China to reciprocate in meaningful ways. At the very least, it’s necessary to try. Focusing on military deterrence alone won’t work. Trying to find a way to cooperate with China is the best way — perhaps the only way — to steer the world away from disaster.

Mike M. Mochizuki is a professor at George Washington University and a nonresident fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Michael D. Swaine is a senior research fellow focusing on China-related security topics at the Quincy Institute.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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Patriarch Sabbah: The real cause of the war in Gaza—and the only path to peace

Editor’s note: America is committed to publishing diverse views on the pressing issues of our time. For additional perspectives on the war in Gaza, read “ There Is a Right and Wrong Way for Catholics to Criticize Israel ,” by Karma Ben Johanan, and Gerard O’Connell’s interview with David Neuhaus, S.J.

We have already seen six months of war in Gaza. Now, it seems that Israel is beginning its last phase of conquest, after ordering a million and a half people to take refuge in Rafah, a border town with Egypt. Soon, there may be almost no one left in the rest of Gaza.

There have been several wars in Gaza, but this time there are thousands of human victims, and ruins like never before, and peace does not seem to be near. More than suffering, more than the loss of men and women, children and babies, humanity is lost.

Why this new war? The immediate cause is the horrific Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023. But another direct cause is the permanent siege imposed upon all Gazan territory in 2007, when the Hamas political party became the governing authority of the enclave. Since then, the entire territory—2.5 million people over an area of 141 square miles​​—has been under total military siege imposed by Israel and Egypt. And since Oct. 7, Israel’s military operations have limited even the most necessary humanitarian aid for Gaza, to the point that it now stands on the cusp of famine.

The real cause is the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, begun in 1948, which no peace agreement has been able to end and which the international community seems to have neglected.

Under Israeli military occupation, Gaza—and all of Palestine—has suffered thousands of deaths, thousands more taken as political prisoners, demolished houses, military checkpoints on all roads that disrupt freedom of movement and daily life, and a paralyzed, dependent Palestinian economy. In short, we are in a permanent state of war. This is the root cause of all wars in Gaza, including the one following Oct. 7. And despite the useless, inhuman violence of the present war, more will come if a just and lasting peace is not reached between the two peoples.

The war must stop without further delay because it is no longer a war. It is a massacre. But what comes after the war?

Israel, as the occupier of Gaza, must take responsibility for seeking a sustainable peace with equal justice for all. Otherwise, we will see an unnecessary defeat for all. It is time for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to be put back on the international agenda and for the global community to take responsibility for building peace, which has seemed impossible until today.

Peace means the security of Israel and, at the same time, the security of the Palestinian people. In fact, the fundamental question that arises today is: Do the Palestinian people have the right to stay at home, on their own land, in their own towns and villages? To this question, the current government in Israel has said no. Instead, Israel has been trying to forcibly displace the Palestinian people, making it virtually impossible for them to live a normal, humane life and raise their families on their own land. That cannot be a path to peace or security for anyone.

To achieve peace, we must simply admit that even in this conflict, human beings are equal. Israelis and Palestinians are equally created by God, in the image of God, and are capable of loving as opposed to killing. On this holy land, there is room for both peoples to exercise the same political rights: two states, each at home, independent, free and capable of resisting a return to war. We have experienced war for decades; we now need a new way of thinking that brings about a lasting peace.

Who is responsible for building this peace? First, the two peoples themselves, Israeli and Palestinian. Then, the international community, the friends of Israel and Palestine. The true friends of Israel are those who help Israel achieve peace. Making Israel militarily stronger, to win wars but remain insecure, is not friendship or true help to Israel.

One can ask the question: Are the two peoples capable of living in peace, each in their own state? Why not? There is much suffering and injustice in living memory, that is true. But there is also the will to live and the fundamental goodness that God has placed in everyone. God created the human being capable of life rather than death, love rather than killing.

The surest path to peace is direct engagement with the enemy, especially when two enemies share the same land. A sustainable peace cannot be brokered by outside forces. So for Israel, peace must be made first with the Palestinian people, then with all the nations in the region. But improving relations with other nations in the region, in what has been called the “ Abrahamic alliance ,” while maintaining hostilities with the Palestinian people, does not ensure peace. First comes peace at home, then it is possible with the neighbors.

It should also be noted that peace among current regimes in the region is not the same as peace with the peoples of the region. Peoples can remain enemies despite peace treaties between governments. Peace will come only when peace is made with the Palestinian people . The world powers can try to impose solutions, but these do not erase the determination of the oppressed.

Therefore, the international community must finally take the necessary steps to end the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people, and end the 1948 war with a peace treaty between the two peoples.

The world’s religions can and must help. Pray, raise your voice and act. The Holy Land is both Israeli and Palestinian, and the Christian community there is part of the two peoples. Everyone needs peace. You can help them. Christ came to bring peace to the world—and to his Holy Land, too. The church has the same mission today.

Patriarch Emeritus Michel Sabbah served as the archbishop and Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem from 1987 to 2008, the first native Palestinian to hold the office for centuries. He is a co-author of the Kairos Palestine Document and a member of the Kairos Palestine board.

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Pope prays for peace and for a two-state solution in Palestine and Israel

By Francesca Merlo

An appeal for peace: Pope Francis repeats his plea for peace worldwide weekly, and the General Audience on Wednesday, 24 April, was no different.

He recalled that "war is always a defeat" and highlighted that those who profit from these tragedies are arms manufacturers. 

Please, asked the Pope, "let us pray for peace", before reiterating that his appeal goes to "martryed Ukraine" which "suffers so much" and where "young soldiers go to die."

Likewise, he continued, we must pray for the Middle East, and in particular for Gaza: "It suffers so much," said the Pope.

Finally, the Pope prayed for peace between Palestine and Israel, "that they may be two states, free and with good relations."

"Let us pray for peace," he concluded.

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