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What is Peace?
A theoretical outline of peace and violence.
“Peace is a daily, a weekly, a monthly process, gradually changing opinions, slowly eroding old barriers, quietly building new structures” — John F. Kennedy
In his speech in the United Nations' general assembly in 1963, United States president John F. Kennedy addressed the obstacles of peace that the cold war had created. Though the cold war has ended decades ago and become mostly a subject of political history, peace, on the other hand, still remains a present-day topic of politics. This leaves us with the question of what is peace and why is it so hard to attain?
To tackle the problem, it would do well to ask first what is the opposite of peace. Probably the first things to come to mind are war, conflict, hostility or violence.
Of the aforementioned, the last one may well be the best candidate as it connects and is present in all the other mentioned alternatives. However, this choice of term merely gives rise to a new question; namely, what is violence. Nonetheless, I believe that once the definition of violence has been illuminated in detail, it is fairly easy to understand the nature of peace. That being said, in what follows, I will offer a brief theoretical…
