What does the concept of positive peace primarily involve?

Concept — Peace is defined on two levels in peace studies. Negative peace is the absence of direct, physical violence — open fighting has stopped. Positive peace goes further: it is the absence of structural violence, that is, the harm built into a society's economic, social and political institutions, together with the presence of justice, equity and cooperative social integration.

Application — The stem asks what positive peace primarily involves. Because the mere cessation of open fighting is already what negative peace names, positive peace has to be defined by what lies beyond it — dismantling the discriminatory, exploitative and unequal institutional arrangements that keep harming people even when no war is being fought. Positive peace therefore primarily involves the removal of structural violence.

Cross-check — How the other descriptions are classified in the same vocabulary:

• Absence of war only — this is Galtung's negative peace; direct violence stops, but the social structures beneath it are untouched.

• Total disarmament — an arms-control measure aimed at the instruments of direct violence; institutional injustice can persist even after weapons are gone.

• Suppression of conflict through force — a quiet imposed by coercion; coercion of this kind is itself an exercise of direct violence, and the underlying inequities remain in place.

So the two-level definition holds: negative peace = absence of war, positive peace = removal of structural violence.