The ‘Learning Peace’ section contains short introductions to a number of topics. You can learn something about conflict resolution and about well-known peace activists, for example. At school we learn a lot about war, but unfortunately we learn little about peace. That is why we especially want to encourage students in secondary school, but also students at colleges and universities, to delve deeper into how you can build peace and raise your voice for this purpose.

When looking at peace one could distinguish three levels: inner peace, interpersonal peace and a culture of peace. These three things all influence each other. When there is war in the area where you live, you will experience a lot of stress and not be able to find inner peace. And then it becomes more difficult to be kind to others and not to argue. Or vice versa: when someone is mean to you, you have to make an extra effort to feel peaceful.Even in a peaceful country like the Netherlands, people may not experience inner peace if they do not take the time to feel peace within themselves every now and then. Especially as many people are often in a hurry, experience many impressions and distractions and spend a lot of time behind a screen. Likewise, when you don’t think about how you interact with others, you won’t be able to work on making society a bit more peaceful.

But wait a minute… what exactly is peace? Well, that’s just as big a word as love or freedom. You could say that inner peace is a form of tranquillity and contentment. Interpersonal peace is also about being able to deal with conflict in a calm and constructive way and having some people close to you. However, peace in society is even more complex, because society is too and it involves millions of people. It is therefore too simplistic to say that peace is the absence of war or armed struggle. Johan Galtung, the founder of peace studies, called this ‘negative peace’. He called the presence of a number of beliefs and attitudes that promote peace ‘positive peace’. Others later made this more specific, for example, the Institute for Economics and Peace has drawn up a peace index with 8 ‘pillars’, while members of the General Assembly of the United Nations (UN) have chosen eight other themes for the concept ‘Culture of Peace‘. As you might expect, the Institute for Economics and Peace places a little more emphasis on the relationship between economics and peace, while the UN places a little more emphasis on social issues such as gender equality. We briefly explain all eight domains on our website.