Finally, violence against the self and the prevention of self-harm and suicide has come within the scope of holistic peace sciences. Peacefulness as a state of mind (‘inner peace’) has implications at the personal level. There is also a relationship between inner and outer peace; it is increasingly acknowledged that violence on different levels is interlinked and that sustainable peace work needs to influence all these levels.
Peace researcher Johan Galtung, known as the father of peace science, used the field of medicine as a source of concepts and theory-building. He defined not war but violence as the opposite of peace, and compared it with disease as the opposite of health. Just as there are many different kinds of disease, so there are many different kinds of violence (see also Lesson 1.3). The following sections illustrate the parallels between peace thinking and medical thinking.