1 Wellbeing and peace building
Johan Galtung, who you met in Session 1, defined three kinds of peace work: peace keeping, peace making and peace building. For Galtung, peace keeping is primarily concerned with keeping antagonists apart; peace making focuses on getting rid of the source of tension; and peace building is concerned with both removing social structures that give rise to violence and war and offering alternatives (Galtung, 1976). Remember that violence takes different forms and includes identity violence such as racism and misogyny.
This session focuses on peace building. The organisation Conciliation Resources supports people living in areas of violent conflict to find resolutions to that conflict. They describe peace building as:
...a long-term process of encouraging people to talk, repairing relationships, and reforming institutions. For positive change to last, everyone affected by a destructive conflict has to be involved in the process of building peace.
In this definition, peace building forms part of the work to resolve conflict and manage the effects of violence. However, peace building can also mean work to prevent conflict becoming violent in the first place. In the context of peace education, peace building is described by Cremin and Bevington as ‘…the forward looking, preventative dimension…’ of peace (Cremin and Bevington, 2017, p. 103). This view of peace building is focused on preventing conflicts becoming violent and destructive rather than rebuilding peace when violent conflict has already occurred. These authors explain that peace building ‘…requires imagining how things could be and working towards that vision…’ (ibid). For this kind of peace building, Cremin and Bevington argue that wellbeing is essential. Wellbeing also forms an important part of ‘peace with myself’ – a section in Peace at the Heart.