What is peace?

01What does peace mean?

According to the political glossary of the Federal Agency for Civic Education (bpb), peace describes a comprehensive and lasting legal order and way of life in which the welfare and prosperity of citizens are the highest goals. In everyday life most people think first of the absence of war. That is right, but it is only part of it.

Peace can exist between states, within a society, in a family and within a person. At every level the question is the same: can people work out their differences without hurting one another, and do they have the security to live without fear?

Peace research therefore distinguishes a narrow and a broad concept of peace. The narrow one means the absence of violence and war. The broad one also includes injustice that harms people without anyone striking a blow.

02Where does the German word Frieden come from?

The word goes back to Old High German fridu, attested since the 8th century, and to vride in Middle High German. Its basic meaning was a state of protection and goodwill. An older meaning is that of a sheltered, fenced-in area.

The related Middle High German verb vriden meant, among other things, to bring peace, to protect, to preserve and to build a fence. It holds an idea that still carries today: peace is a space in which you are protected.

The German word zufrieden, meaning content, comes from the same family. It was contracted from the phrase zu Frieden and still describes a state in which nothing is missing.

03Is peace more than the absence of war?

For peace research, yes. In 1969 the Norwegian researcher Johan Galtung distinguished between negative and positive peace. Negative peace is the absence of direct violence; positive peace is also the absence of structural violence, that is, of conditions that prevent people from developing their potential.

This distinction has strongly shaped peace research and peace education. Galtung understands peace as a process, at international, social and personal level, not as a state reached once and for all.

The broad concept is contested, however. Critics object that it covers so much that it can hardly be achieved, and some researchers argue for focusing on the narrow concept again. Both views are set out in more detail on the page about positive and negative peace.

04What do the Basic Law and the UN Charter say?

Germany's Basic Law (Grundgesetz) names peace in its very first sentence. The Preamble states that the German people gave themselves the Basic Law inspired by the determination to promote world peace as an equal partner in a united Europe.

Article 26 becomes concrete: acts tending to and undertaken with intent to disturb the peaceful relations between nations, and especially to prepare for a war of aggression, are unconstitutional and shall be made a criminal offence.

At international level, peace comes first in the Charter of the United Nations. Its first purpose is to maintain international peace and security. Since 2015, Sustainable Development Goal 16 has been added: promote peaceful and inclusive societies, provide access to justice for all and build effective institutions.

05What does peace mean in everyday life?

In everyday life peace rarely shows itself as a big event. It shows in how neighbours settle a dispute, how a school class deals with exclusion, whether conflicts in a family can be spoken about without anyone having to be afraid.

There are methods for this that can be learned, from Nonviolent Communication to mediation, and there are people who work for it professionally or as volunteers. In this sense peace is something that is made, not only something that prevails.

This is exactly where W3ltfrieden comes in: the platform connects people who want to work for peace with peace missions in their area. The pages below go deeper into how peace comes about, who works on it and how it can be learned.

06How do other languages express peace?

The Latin word for peace is pax, genitive pacis. According to the Digital Dictionary of the German Language, it belongs to the same word family as pactum, the agreement, and an old verb meaning to reach an agreement. In the Roman understanding, according to the Scholarly Bible Dictionary on the Internet, pax referred above all to the state that interrupts and suspends warfare. The Pacific also carries this root in its name: in 1520 the navigator Magellan called it the peaceful sea because he believed it to be relatively free of violent storms.

In Greek, peace is eirene. In general usage, the word meant above all the renunciation of violence. Eirene was also a goddess, the daughter of Zeus and Themis. A statue set up on the Agora in Athens around 375 BC showed her holding the boy Plutos, who stands for wealth. When the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek, the Septuagint mostly rendered the Hebrew shalom as eirene. This is how the broad meaning of shalom also entered the New Testament.

Shalom itself occurs 237 times in the Hebrew Bible and goes back to the Semitic root šlm. The same root lives on in Arabic salām, whose basic meaning the Institute of Near and Middle Eastern Studies at LMU Munich gives as integrity, well-being, salvation, peace and security. It is found in the greeting as-salāmu ʿalaykum, literally "peace upon you" or "peace be with you." Those who greet this way wish that nothing harmful will befall the other person.

What all these words have in common is that they mean more than a pause between two wars. They link peace with agreement, integrity and well-being. The German word fits this picture as well: Frieden is etymologically related to Freund, the word for friend.

07How does the Bible understand peace?

The Bible understands peace more broadly than the absence of war. According to the Evangelical Church in Germany, the Hebrew word shalom means roughly to be whole or to be complete. It refers to a good relationship with other people, with oneself and with God, that is, a state in which people are well in every respect.

In the Old Testament, peace touches every area of life: the family, the community, relations between peoples and with nature. A well-known passage is found in the prophet Isaiah. It says that people will "beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into sickles" and will no longer learn to make war.

In the Bible, peace is closely tied to justice. One psalm expresses the hope that "justice and peace will kiss." In the New Testament, Jesus calls on people in the Sermon on the Mount to love their enemies. In the Protestant church, this love of one's enemies is regarded as an important foundation of Christian thinking about peace.