Positive peace, a concept developed by the Norwegian peace researcher Johan Galtung, describes the presence of the conditions — justice, functioning institutions, mutual trust, shared prosperity — that make organized violence structurally unnecessary. It contrasts with negative peace, which merely denotes the absence of overt war. In an Age of Abundance framing, positive peace is the normative target: a ceasefire is cheap, but a civilization in which neighbors have no standing reason to fight is expensive to build and maintain.
Structural and cultural violence
Galtung paired positive peace with two further concepts: structural violence (harm done by institutions — poverty, exclusion, untreated disease) and cultural violence (the narratives that legitimize the first two). On this reading, a society with no active war but with systemic child hunger or entrenched ethnic hierarchy is not at peace; it has simply displaced violence from the battlefield into the balance sheet. Positive peace asks what it would take for both forms to recede together.
Abundance as underwriting
Abundance-era goods — cheap clean electrons, universal basic education, near-zero-marginal-cost diagnostic medicine, compute available to anyone with a device — directly reduce the material substrate of structural violence. They do not guarantee positive peace, but they make the institutions that deliver it cheaper to operate and harder to justify withholding. The Peace Dividend of earlier eras was mostly fiscal; the abundance-era dividend is partly that dignity itself becomes less expensive.
Measurement and the Global Peace Index
The Institute for Economics and Peace has attempted to operationalize positive peace through eight "pillars" — well-functioning government, equitable distribution of resources, free flow of information, good relations with neighbors, high human capital, acceptance of the rights of others, low corruption, and sound business environment. The measurement remains contested, but the exercise is useful: it converts a philosophical distinction into something institutions can audit against.
Critiques and limits
Critics warn that "positive peace" can be used to launder the status quo — any regime can claim its institutions embody justice. Others note that abundance without redistribution can widen structural violence even as aggregate wealth grows; this is the core worry of Distributional Justice in Abundance. And some peace theorists argue Galtung's typology is too tidy, understating how often positive peace is built atop a forgotten act of coercion. The article treats these critiques as load-bearing rather than peripheral.