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Michael Goode, John Smolenski, The Revolutionary Potential of Peace History, The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 1, March 2025, Pages 186–194, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae389
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Peace history, we believe, has revolutionary potential. Using peace as a category of historical analysis could change how historians write the grand narratives through which they organize and interpret the past. It could change how historians decide what to include or emphasize in these stories. It can remind historians of the importance of contingency in their work. Peace history might help historians ask new questions of old sources. And it might remind us of the value and necessity of listening to scholars in other fields who write about the past. Big claims.
To show how we think peace history might live up to this potential, though, requires answering a very basic question: What do we mean by “peace”?
Ask anyone what the word peace means, and you will get some variation on the conventional definition, that it is either “an absence of violence” or “a time when people or nations are not at war.” In peace studies, this is known as negative peace. Less often, people think of peace as something other than an absence. Articulations of peace that convey some notion of individual or communal well-being are what peace studies scholars call positive peace. Peace can be both positive and negative, and historical examples of positive and negative peace go back centuries. To ancient Greeks, for example, peace—or Irene (Εἰρήνη)—connoted a state of tranquility, derived from the absence of war. The absence of war in this case refers to negative peace, whereas “a state of tranquility” points to some notion of positive peace, even if the substance of what is being envisioned is left unstated.
