From Where I Stood, It Was an Arrival: Galtung, Africa, and the Work of Peace

An open letter to Tor Egil Førland, PRIO, and everyone who claims to work for peace

Dear Professor Tor Egil Førland,

In March, I spoke with you at length for your biography of Johan Galtung. Afterwards, you sent me the transcript. You invited me to correct misunderstandings and assured me that, if you quoted me, you would make my spoken words fit for print without changing their meaning. You also wrote something generous about Galtung: that his speech was so elegant it could go straight to the printer.

I appreciated that exchange. I spoke because I thought you wanted to understand a life and its work. After reading your article, “All Over the Place: The Trajectory of Johan Galtung,” I am no longer confident that the work will receive the same care as the transcript.

So let me begin with a correction more substantial than anything an automatic transcription program could make: I withdraw my contribution to your biography. I ask you not to quote, paraphrase, or otherwise use my interview in the book. My position, and my reasons for it, are here in public. You are free to engage with them.

I know a published article is not a completed biography. I cannot claim to know every page you will write. But you called the article a trailer for the project. A trailer tells us what the filmmaker thinks the story is. Yours tells a story in which a brilliant young scholar builds institutions, then leaves the respectable ground of empirical research and wanders the world dispensing increasingly undisciplined ideas. The reader meets the traveller, the ego, the provocateur. The peacemaker is present, but strangely hard to hear.

It seems like a scholar may travel the world to study conflict. He must take care not to become too interested in resolving it.

What I thought I was telling you

When I first encountered Galtung’s work in the early 2000s, I was already thinking about violence, African traditions of dialogue, and the possibilities of art in peacebuilding. Through Prof. Olivier Urbain in Japan, I read Galtung’s Peace by Peaceful Means. It gave me language for questions I had been carrying. It also left me dissatisfied. Africa appeared too little in the account I was reading.

My response was to write the essay Peace By Africans’ Peaceful Means. I brought Galtung’s concepts into conversation with African histories, structural violence, and practices of dialogue and conflict transformation. I did not accept a theory as a sacred object. I argued with it, extended it, and tried to make it answer to another reality.

Galtung read my work. We began to talk and exchange. That encounter and friendship helped shape my path in peace work. It is the sort of intellectual history that disappears when the later Galtung is described mainly through his distance from the academic centre. From that centre, a journey outward may look like a departure. From where I stood, it could be an arrival.

Your article acknowledges his early concepts and institutional achievements. It records TRANSCEND, too. But recording that a method existed is not the same as asking what people did with it. What happened when practitioners used it to look beyond a contest between two entrenched positions? Where did it help them discover unmet needs or imagine a different outcome? Where did it fail? What did people in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Europe change when they made it their own? Those are demanding questions. They require more than admiration, and they deserve more than a joke about a travelling salesman.

Galtung’s Conflict Transformation by Peaceful Means was developed as a training manual for the United Nations Disaster Management Training Programme. His later A Theory of Development: Overcoming Structural Violence continued to ask how structures obstruct human needs and how development might address them. One can challenge their assumptions, evidence, or results. One must first treat them as arguments worth examining.

The question beneath the biography

Does peace work remain intellectually serious when it tries to change the world it studies?

If the answer is yes, then Galtung’s movement from measuring violence toward designing alternatives demands analysis. Positive peace was not a decorative addition to the absence of war. Structural violence asked us to notice harm built into institutions and distributions of power. Conflict transformation asked us to look for possibilities beyond one party’s victory over another. These ideas can be criticised, tested, revised, and sometimes rejected. But treating the move from diagnosis to practice as evidence of decline quietly narrows what peace research is allowed to be.

I have seen this narrowing from the practitioner’s side. In our interview, I spoke about trying to bring TRANSCEND into work with organisations in the field and meeting scepticism. I also spoke about real weaknesses within the network such as scarce funding.

You yourself recognised the funding dilemma in your March email. Galtung’s insistence on independence from government money carried a price. So did the attempt to keep ambitious work alive without large donors. That tension has consequences for an organisation, its reach, and the people who labour within it. It calls for investigation. “He went travelling” is a much easier story to tell.

Criticism deserves better than insinuation

Galtung could be difficult. I told you so. He was not exempt from error because he devoted his life to peace. His disputed statements, including those that gave rise to accusations of antisemitism, must be examined seriously. That means identifying the statements, considering their context and impact, reading his responses, and saying plainly where those responses do or do not suffice. Friendship does not settle the matter. Neither does a favourable record elsewhere erase a harmful formulation.

But an accusation of that gravity must not serve as atmospheric lighting for a portrait of intellectual deterioration. Readers deserve to know what is being established, what remains contested, and how each bears on the ideas under discussion. A biographer can hold a person accountable without making controversy the key that unlocks every room in his life. An honest history does not need a spotless subject, of course. It also needs an author willing to follow the evidence even when it complicates the plot.

A question for PRIO, and for the rest of us

PRIO owes its existence to Galtung’s initiative. It gives PRIO an opportunity to ask what became of the questions that led him to found it.

Professor Førland, which parts of Galtung’s later work do you believe can still help people create peace? Which parts cannot, and why? What standards are you using to judge a conflict transformation method: its standing in a university department, its institutional durability, its results in practice, or some combination of these? When a method travels beyond Europe and is altered by those who use it, does that count as intellectual influence?

Jan Øberg has issued a forceful challenge to the framing of the special issue and the planned biography. I share the concern that personality can eclipse ideas. I would put the challenge this way: show us the work. Show us the theories being examined against evidence, the methods against experience, and the later contributions against the world they tried to address. If Galtung’s answers were inadequate, demonstrate it. If some remain useful, say so. If peace research has developed better answers, let us see them.

I am withdrawing my interview because I do not want my memories to lend the appearance of breadth to a portrait whose published preview leaves so little room for the work I described. This is my judgment about your article and my participation, not a claim that I have read the unwritten book.

Johan Galtung died in 2024. A biographer cannot kill him twice. But a biography can make a living body of work look like the unfortunate afterlife of a once promising career. It can leave future readers knowing that its subject was vain, restless, and controversial while knowing remarkably little about what he asked them to do when faced with violence.

That would be a peculiar achievement for peace research: preserving the founder in the footnotes while losing sight of peace.