Peace Psychology – UGC NET – Notes

Introduction

Peace psychology is a specialized subfield of psychology that focuses on the study of the psychological causes, consequences, and prevention of destructive conflict — both at the interpersonal and the societal level. It emerged as a formal discipline in the mid-twentieth century, largely in response to the horrific violence of the two World Wars, the Holocaust, the use of nuclear weapons, and later the proliferation of ethnic cleansing, genocide, and civil wars across the globe. The American Psychological Association (APA) established its Division 48 — Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict, and Violence in 1990, marking an institutional recognition of the discipline.

Peace psychology does not merely study the absence of war. Rather, it draws heavily from the distinction made by Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung, who differentiated between negative peace — defined simply as the absence of direct physical violence — and positive peace — which refers to the presence of justice, equity, cooperation, and the structural conditions that allow human beings to live with dignity. This distinction is foundational because it implies that even societies without active warfare can be deeply violent in structural and cultural terms. The discipline therefore asks: what are the psychological mechanisms that drive human beings and collectives toward violence, and what conditions foster the building of lasting peace?

Peace psychology draws from social psychology, clinical psychology, developmental psychology, political psychology, sociology, anthropology, international relations, and communication studies. It studies how prejudice, dehumanization, obedience to authority, in-group and out-group dynamics, trauma, historical grievances, and collective memory all interact to produce cycles of violence — and how they can be interrupted.

Violence

Defining Violence

Violence is one of the most complex concepts in peace psychology. At its most basic level, violence refers to the intentional use of physical force or power against another person or group in a way that results in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment, or deprivation. However, peace psychologists have expanded this definition significantly.

Johan Galtung’s triadic model identifies three forms of violence:

1. Direct violence refers to physical harm inflicted by a visible actor upon a visible victim. This includes warfare, murder, rape, torture, and genocide. It is the most immediately recognizable form of violence.

2. Structural violence refers to harm caused not by a direct agent but by the structures of society — economic systems, political institutions, legal frameworks — that systematically deny people access to resources, rights, and opportunities. Poverty, systemic racism, caste discrimination, gender inequality, and denial of healthcare are all forms of structural violence. The harm is real and measurable — in shortened lifespans, stunted development, psychological suffering — but there is no single identifiable perpetrator.

3. Cultural violence refers to the aspects of culture — religion, ideology, language, art, media, science — that are used to legitimize or justify direct and structural violence. When a society’s dominant culture frames a particular group as subhuman, dangerous, criminal, or morally inferior, it creates the psychological permission structure for both direct and structural violence.

These three forms reinforce each other in what Galtung called the violence triangle. Cultural violence legitimizes structural violence; structural violence creates conditions of desperation that fuel direct violence; and direct violence is used to maintain structural hierarchies.

Psychological Roots of Violence

Peace psychologists have identified numerous psychological mechanisms that underlie human violence, particularly at the collective level.

Dehumanization is perhaps the most extensively documented psychological precursor to mass violence. When individuals or groups are portrayed as less than human — as insects, vermin, animals, demons, or as inherently dangerous — it becomes psychologically easier to harm or kill them. The work of David Livingstone Smith in his book Less Than Human documents how dehumanization has historically preceded virtually every episode of genocide and mass atrocity. In Rwanda, Tutsi people were called “inyenzi” (cockroaches) in radio broadcasts before and during the 1994 genocide. In Nazi Germany, Jewish people were systematically compared to rats and parasites in state propaganda. Dehumanization operates by suspending the empathy and moral inhibitions that normally prevent humans from harming one another.

In-group and out-group dynamics are deeply rooted in human social cognition. Henri Tajfel’s Social Identity Theory, developed in the 1970s, demonstrated that human beings derive part of their identity from membership in social groups, and that they naturally tend to view their own group (the in-group) more favorably and attribute more negative characteristics to out-groups. This in-group favoritism and out-group derogation creates the psychological substrate for ethnic conflict, nationalism, religious violence, and war. When group identity becomes sufficiently threatened or politicized, it can generate extreme hostility toward out-groups.

Obedience to authority was dramatically illustrated by Stanley Milgram’s famous experiments in the 1960s, in which ordinary American citizens were willing to administer what they believed to be severe and dangerous electric shocks to another person simply because an authority figure in a lab coat instructed them to do so. Milgram’s research suggested that a significant proportion of human beings will engage in harmful behaviors toward others if sanctioned by legitimate authority — a finding with profound implications for understanding how ordinary soldiers, police officers, and bureaucrats participate in mass atrocities.

Moral disengagement, a concept developed by Albert Bandura, refers to the set of psychological mechanisms — including moral justification, euphemistic labeling, advantageous comparison, displacement of responsibility, diffusion of responsibility, and victim dehumanization or attribution of blame — through which individuals disengage their moral self-regulatory standards and engage in harmful behaviors without guilt or self-censure. Organizations and states use moral disengagement extensively to enable their members to participate in collective violence.

Trauma and historical grievances play an enormously important role in sustaining cycles of violence across generations. Vamik Volkan, a Turkish-Cypriot psychoanalyst, developed the concept of the “chosen trauma” — a large group’s shared mental representation of a catastrophic event suffered by ancestors, which becomes a core part of group identity. Chosen traumas are not simply memories but are actively transmitted across generations through rituals, narratives, and cultural practices. They create a persistent sense of victimhood and grievance that can be exploited by political leaders to mobilize violence against perceived enemies. The Serbian mobilization around the Battle of Kosovo (1389), the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Nakba, and Hindu-Muslim tensions in South Asia all involve chosen traumas of this kind.

Relative deprivation theory, developed by Ted Gurr in his landmark work Why Men Rebel (1970), argues that violence and rebellion arise not simply from poverty or objective deprivation, but from the gap between what people expect to have and what they actually possess. When rising expectations — generated by education, media exposure, political promises, or economic growth — are frustrated by actual conditions, the resulting sense of injustice and resentment generates political violence. This helps explain why revolutionary movements and ethnic conflicts often emerge not in the most absolutely deprived societies but in those experiencing rapid but uneven change.

Authoritarianism and the authoritarian personality, first described by Theodor Adorno and colleagues in their massive post-war study The Authoritarian Personality (1950), describes a cluster of traits — submission to authority, aggression toward out-groups, rigid thinking, conventionalism, and punitiveness — that predispose individuals to both follow authoritarian leaders and to support violence against stigmatized minorities. While later researchers critiqued aspects of this work, the basic insight that certain personality structures are more susceptible to manipulation by demagogues has remained influential in peace psychology.