Tag: Johan Galtung

“ON THE ROLE OF THE MEDIA FOR WORLD-WIDE SECURITY AND PEACE” by Johan Galtung (1985)

What the media do and what researchers do are not that different. Both of them relate to empirical reality and are interested in getting data – only that the media are particularly concerned with highly contemporary data, data from today, new data called news; researchers may also be satisfied with “olds”. Both are concerned with theories, efforts to understand the data, to interpret them – usually put into the commentary in the newspapers, such as editorials and in the theory section of a scientific article or book. And both of them are actually concerned with values, only that the media are usually more honest, making the values very explicit – researchers have a tendency to hide their values even to themselves, pretending that they are “value-free”, objective – uninfluenced by anything but data and the effort to interpret them.

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Johan Galtung: The Doctrine Of Just War: Just that, war! (Or more war than just).

Reproduced from: https://www.transcend.org/galtung/papers/The%20Doctrine%20Of%20Just%20War.pdf THE DOCTRINE OF JUST WAR: JUST THAT, WAR! (OR MORE WAR THAN JUST) By Johan Galtung, Peace and Conflict Studies, Univ. of Queensland There is no scarcity of literature in this field, much of it permutations around the basic core of “I am of course against war, but – -“. So let it… Read More

“Global Projections of Deep-Rooted US Pathologies” by Johan Galtung (1996)

This paper by Johan Galtung analyzes the deep-rooted cultural, psychological, and structural drivers underlying U.S. foreign policy, conceptualizing them as collective “pathologies” that are projected globally through patterns of violence, domination, and exceptionalism. Using psychoanalytic metaphors and systems theory, Galtung identifies three interlinked complexes — Chosenness-Myths-Traumas (CMT), Dichotomy-Manicheism-Armageddon (DMA), and Repression-Projection (RP) — as embedded in the U.S. collective subconscious and shaping elite decision-making. He argues that these archetypal forces narrow foreign policy choices, sustain a worldview of “Good vs. Evil,” and normalize violent interventions while marginalizing nonviolent alternatives. Through ten case studies — including Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Cold War, Vietnam, U.S. policy in Latin America, Israel-Palestine, and the Gulf War — the paper demonstrates how these deep structures reproduce global violence and inhibit rational, cooperative responses. Galtung concludes by calling for “therapies” to deconstruct these unconscious pathologies and foster new forms of dialogue, empathy, and multilateralism as pathways toward sustainable peace

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“Who Runs The World? The Subconscious(*)” by Johan Galtung

Not one or a group of persons, not one or a group of countries. But they may serve as instruments for scripts engraved on the deeper recesses of their minds, not the conscious, easily retrievable ones. Scripts that are too trivial, obvious, too painful/shameful and hence repressed. Jung calls them archetypes; they often come in syndromes.

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How a life-valued versus money-valued dichotomy makes a world of indifference to peace!

How a life-valued versus money-valued dichotomy makes a world of money-valued indifference to peace, and how the cognitive maps of Carl Jung, Johan Galtung and John McMurtry make a world of life-valued difference to healing that indifference! Have we collectively inherited a money-valued as opposed to a life-valued collective unconscious? Does money-value enable cultural violence… Read More

Transforming our world from a fake dominant culture debased on money-value to a true partnership culture recentered on life-value

In a previous post entitled Embracing the paradigm shift – from the principalities of darkness to the principles that value life, I opined: “Unless we come face to face and heart to heart with the demons within and  be able to verbalise that which is repressed within and projected onto others without, the vicious cylce of… Read More

Cultural Violence by Johan Galtung (1990)

This article by Johan Galtung (1990) introduces the concept of cultural violence as a complement to his earlier theory of structural violence (1969). Cultural violence refers to those aspects of a society’s symbolic sphere — including religion, ideology, language, art, empirical science, and formal science — that can be used to legitimize direct or structural violence. While cultural violence does not physically harm, it normalizes and renders acceptable the conditions or acts of harm, shifting perceptions of violence from “wrong” to “right” or “inevitable.” Galtung employs a violence triangle framework that interrelates direct violence (physical acts), structural violence (systemic inequality), and cultural violence (normative justification), alongside a violence strata model highlighting their different temporalities and causal flows. The paper provides examples from multiple cultural domains and explores how cultural narratives, ideologies, and cosmologies sustain violence across generations. Finally, Galtung connects these insights to Gandhian principles of unity of life and unity of means and ends, proposing a transition from a vicious triangle of violence to a virtuous triangle of peace rooted in cultural transformation.

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