Peace Notes | Class 11 Political Science
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This chapter looks at what peace really means, why it is so hard to keep, and the many forms of violence that disturb it. You will learn how different thinkers have understood peace, what structural violence is, the various ways nations try to build peace, and the contemporary challenges the world still faces. For more notes like this, browse our Class 11 Political Science notes.
Introduction to Peace
Peace is the condition of societal friendship and harmony in the absence of hostility and violence. In everyday use, peace means a lack of conflict, such as war, and freedom from the fear of violence between individuals or groups.
A fuller definition sees peace as the absence of violent conflict of every kind, including war, riot, massacre, assassination or simply physical attack.
Peace is valued today not only because people believe in it, but because humanity has paid a huge price for its absence.
Example. The decades after the Second World War were marked by intense rivalry between two superpowers, the capitalist USA and the communist USSR, each seeking world supremacy. The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 was a particularly dark episode in this military competition. Other reminders of the cost of war include the carpet bombing of London during the Second World War and the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
How was Friedrich Nietzsche's view of peace different?
The nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was one of the thinkers who glorified war. He did not value peace because he believed that only conflict could drive the growth of civilisation. Most modern thinkers reject this view, arguing that lasting progress depends on cooperation, not bloodshed.
Structural Violence
Not all violence is one person striking another. Some violence is built into the very way a society is organised, so that whole groups of people are kept down, denied dignity or robbed of opportunity. This hidden, everyday harm is called structural violence. Common forms in our world include the following.
The caste system
The traditional caste system in India treated certain groups as outcastes or untouchables. The Indian Constitution has outlawed the practice of untouchability, yet the country is still struggling to erase the scars and relics of this custom. A social order based on class may appear more flexible, but it too generates a great deal of inequality and oppression.
Patriarchy
Patriarchy is a form of social organisation that results in the systematic subordination of, and discrimination against, women. Its many faces include the selective abortion of female foetuses, the denial of adequate nourishment and education to the girl child, child marriage, wife battering, dowry-related crimes, sexual harassment at the workplace, rape and honour killing.
The low child sex ratio for the 0 to 6 years age group, 919 females per 1000 males in India as per the 2011 Census, is a striking measure of the damage done by patriarchy.
Racism and communalism
Colonialism, in the sense of the prolonged and direct rule of one people by a foreign power, is now a rare phenomenon, but it has not disappeared completely. Racism and communalism involve the stigmatisation and oppression of an entire racial group or community. Apartheid, a policy followed until the early 1990s by the White-controlled government in South Africa, treated the country's majority Black population as second-class citizens.
Racial discrimination still continues covertly in the West, often directed against immigrants from Asia, Africa and Latin America. Communalism may be seen as the South Asian counterpart of racism, where the victims tend to be minority religious groups.
Eliminating Violence
The Constitution of UNESCO captures a key idea about where peace must begin.
Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed.
Healing techniques such as psychoanalysis and meditation can help at the level of the individual mind. But violence is not rooted only in a person's psyche. It also grows out of unjust social structures. To remove structural violence, a just and democratic society has to be built. Peace, then, is a process: it means actively pursuing the moral and material resources needed to secure human welfare in the broadest sense of the term.
Can violence ever promote peace?
It has often been claimed that, while violence is evil, it can sometimes be a necessary step towards peace, for example when tyrants and oppressors can only be stopped by force. Pacifists, who hold peace to be the highest value, take a moral stand against the use of violence even for just ends. Instead, they call for mobilising love and truth to win over the hearts and minds of oppressors.
This does not mean that a firm but non-violent form of resistance cannot be effective. Civil disobedience is a common mode of struggle that has been used to break down oppressive structures. Gandhi's use of satyagraha during the Indian freedom movement is a leading example, and Martin Luther King used similar methods to fight anti-Black racial discrimination in the United States in the 1960s.
Peace and the State
The division of the world into separate sovereign states is often argued to obstruct the pursuit of peace. Because each state views itself as a self-contained and supreme entity, it feels compelled to safeguard its own perceived self-interest, even at the cost of others.
The state is meant to use its forces, such as the army and the police, to protect its citizens. In practice, those same forces can be turned against citizens to suppress dissent. The long-term answer is to make the state more accountable through meaningful democratisation and to rein it in through an effective system of civil liberties. This is why the fight for democracy and human rights is bound up closely with the preservation of peace.
Different approaches to the pursuit of peace
Thinkers suggest three broad approaches to building peace.
- The first approach places states at the centre, respects their sovereignty and treats competition among them as a fact of life. Its main concern is managing that competition and containing possible conflict through arrangements between states, such as a balance of power.
- The second approach accepts that rivalry between states runs deep, but it stresses the positive presence and possibilities of interdependence, and the growing social and economic cooperation among nations.
- The third approach treats the state system as a passing phase of human history. It looks forward to the emergence of a supra-national order and sees the building of a global community as the surest guarantee of peace. Its supporters argue that the ongoing process of globalisation is steadily reducing the primacy and sovereignty of the state, creating conditions for world peace.
Contemporary Challenges
Despite a number of notable achievements, the world has not managed to prevent or remove every threat to peace. Instead, dominant states have often asserted their sovereignty and sought to shape both their regions and the wider international system to suit their own perceptions and priorities.
Terrorism has risen partly in response to the self-serving and ham-handed behaviour of aggressive states. The international community has too often failed to check both the ambitions of dominant powers and the guerrilla tactics of terrorists, and it has sometimes stood by as a silent witness to genocide, the systematic killing of a large group of people. The break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991 ended the era of superpower nuclear rivalry and removed one major threat to international security, yet new dangers have taken its place.
Why it still matters
The ideas in this chapter are not just history. They describe the world of 2025 and 2026. Briefing the UN Security Council in 2025, senior UN officials noted that the previous year had seen about 61 active conflicts, the highest number since 1946, according to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program. Wars in places such as Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan show how quickly the fear of violence that this chapter describes can return.
The cost is enormous. The Global Peace Index 2025, published by the Institute for Economics and Peace, estimated that the economic impact of violence reached 19.97 trillion US dollars in 2024, about 11.6 per cent of the world's total output. Money spent on armies, weapons and repairing the damage of war is money not spent on schools, hospitals or clean water. This is the modern face of the huge price the chapter says humanity pays for the absence of peace.
The chapter's third approach, the building of a global community, is visible in real institutions. In 2025 more than 60,000 UN peacekeepers from 115 countries were serving in 11 missions around the world, trying to protect civilians in conflict zones. Structural violence is still with us too: gender gaps, caste discrimination and racism remain live debates in India and beyond. Understanding peace helps you read the news with sharper eyes. To connect topics like this to current world affairs, explore the Learnacy Hub, and revise the rest of the syllabus through our study notes library.
Sources
- https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/09/1165807
- https://www.visionofhumanity.org/the-great-fragmentation-driving-conflict-world-peace-plummets/