What is the difference between positive and negative peace?
Negative peace can be defined as the absence of war, when people are not actually fighting one another. It doesn’t indicate that they’re not likely to start fighting one another at any moment; it may be just a brief interval between conflicts. But at the same time, they’re not actually trying to kill one another. Positive peace is a situation in which there is not any probability of conflict, where people do not have to prepare for it or think about conflict, where there is a stable organization of society in which there’s neither need nor inclination to resort to violence. How do some of the conditions of peace turn into war? During peacetime, conflicts boil up which eventually do explode into war. It is the nature of the structure of society during peacetime. For example, in Europe, between the two world wars there was peace. Nonetheless, there were intensive rivalries and hostilities. Even in a democratic structure such as Weimar Germany, extremist movements could come to power whic
