Johan Galtung

Biography

Johan Vincent Galtung, born on October 24, 1930, in Oslo, Norway, became a hugely influential social scientist in the twentieth century. Educated at the University of Oslo, he spent his career exploring the root causes of conflict and conditions for lasting peace. He is known as the main founder of peace and conflict studies, establishing it as a serious academic pursuit when it was often dismissed as mere idealism. Galtung passed away on February 17, 2024, in Bærum Municipality, Norway, after nearly seven decades of influencing global discussions on war, peace, and human rights.

In 1959, Galtung started the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) and was its first director until 1970. A few years later, in 1964, he started the Journal of Peace Research, a key publication in the field. His theoretical work was significant and varied, with one major idea distinguishing negative peace—simply the absence of war—from positive peace, which includes social justice and cooperative systems. He also developed the concept of structural violence, suggesting that social structures can harm and kill by keeping people from meeting their basic needs, just like direct physical violence can.

In 1969, Galtung became the first professor in peace and conflict studies worldwide, at the University of Oslo. He left this position in 1977 and later taught at various universities globally. From 1993 to 2000, he was Distinguished Professor of Peace Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi and held the Tun Mahathir Professor of Global Peace post at the International Islamic University Malaysia until 2015. Throughout his career, he taught, lectured, and did research across Europe, Asia, and the Americas.

Galtung wrote over a hundred books and many academic articles and was a prominent public figure. He was married to Ingrid Eide, a significant personality in Norwegian academia and politics. His work went beyond academics into conflict mediation, where he created the TRANSCEND method, used in resolving disputes from territorial issues to international crises. His direct engagement with opposing parties and unique solutions made him admired but sometimes controversial.

Throughout his life, Galtung received many awards for his work, including the Right Livelihood Award in 1987, often called the alternative Nobel Prize, the Humanist Prize in 1988, the Jamnalal Bajaj Award in 1993, the Brage Prize for non-fiction in 2000, and the Erik Bye Memorial Prize in 2011. He also received honorary doctorates from the University of Alicante in 2002 and the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in 2017. His career covered mathematics, sociology, political science, and moral philosophy, making him a truly interdisciplinary thinker whose ideas found audiences well beyond academic circles.