Were We Ever Taught a Culture of Peace?
What Do We Mean When We Say Peace?
Building a Culture of Peace: It’s hardly surprising given the current state of the world, more often than not, I catch myself thinking about peace.
While in Haarlem the other day, I was excited to see a house displaying a “Peace Now” poster in its front window. It gave me a small sense of relief seeing this poster movement grow. A sense that more people are aligning themselves with peace in an unjust world.
But on the train journey back to The Hague, the self declared International City of Peace and Justice, I found myself wondering: when we speak of peace, what are we actually talking about?
Because I’ve realised I no longer understand what people mean when they say peace.
Governments, leaders, and some institutions seem to have taken the hard line that more weapons, more military spending, more resources, more domination, and more surveillance are the road to peace.
It’s left the few brave calling for peace right now to open up public discourse beyond peace being a vague slogan or a comfortable moral position.
It is a call to stop unbearable, immediate harm. It is a call to stop genocide. To stop children being killed. To stop people being starved, displaced, buried under rubble, erased from their homes, and stripped of any safe future.
Not by the institutions, but by people who refuse to accept that some lives can be treated as disposable.
But I wonder, with the call for militarisation, and those outside of peace movements, what impact does this rhetoric have on our understanding of peace?
Because the more I reflect on the word, the less sure I am that we were ever really taught what it means.
The Culture of Peace We Were Never Taught
We live in a society where most of us are not taught peace beyond compliance and order.
By default, we are taught conflict management, punishment, competition, winning, security, deterrence, and control. And I’m sure this list is longer.
But are we taught coexistence? Repair? Interdependence? Emotional regulation? Care? Respect for difference? Respect for non human life?
I feel like there has been a slow accumulation around peace bubbling away inside me. A pressure building as I watch the language around peace become increasingly detached from what the word actually evokes in people emotionally, spiritually, and ethically.
Sure, I think many of us are noticing the contradiction between the word “peace” and the behaviours being justified in its name. Primarily due to a certain US administration.
But I feel we need to question why the word peace is so undeveloped culturally.
And as I write this, a deeper question comes to mind.
What is the underlying relationship we have with life itself?
I keep wondering whether peace is impossible while we continue normalising harm in everyday life, including the systems that, hands up, I am also entangled in. No purity here.
Sadly, the harsh truth is that our culture has normalised domination, extraction, hierarchy, disposability, and disconnection in everyday life.
We have witnessed how this scales conflict into our politics, our economics, our ecosystems, and into war.
And I can’t help but recognise the irony that we invoke peace constantly, yet we barely know how to practise it.
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Peace Is Respect for All Life
On the train home, I was trying to define peace in my simple yet widening understanding, and noted:
“Peace is conflict without harm.”
My thought process behind this was: I do not pretend that humans will ever fully agree. Conflict, difference, and tension are all natural. It’s that next step of harm where things change. And this, I think, is where peace breaks. A belief that some lives matter less than others.
Personally, I’m wrestling with an idea that I noted next:
“True peace is respect for all life.”
Because if that is the case, then peace starts at home. In how we treat ourselves, others, animals, the planet, what we consume, what we tolerate, what we teach.
True peace becomes a practice of relationship rather than a slogan.
I feel there is something powerful in connecting peace to the ordinary. The kitchen. Consumption. Exhaustion. Relationships. Tone of voice. Neighbours. Animals. The worker behind the product. The nervous system. The algorithm. The soil.
It’s actually all those things I write about here, without yet having got to a core, common denominator.
So What Would It Mean to Build a Culture of Peace?
Where most institutions treat peace as the absence of war, building a culture of peace would mean flipping this entirely. That may sound impossible or idealistic. But I want to go there for a moment. Peace would not be something achieved after conflict. It would be something actively lived before, during, and after it.
It would be grounded in a relationship of care.
Conflict would become something to move through, rather than something to win. It would mean learning to sit with unresolved tension without immediately forcing resolution, domination, or silence.
I think a culture of peace lives in the thousands of micro decisions we make each day.
How we treat the person standing in front of us. How we speak when we are tired. How we respond when we feel threatened. How we hold power when someone else is vulnerable.
It would live in our language too.
A culture of peace would ask why our everyday speech is so saturated with militarised language. We are “killing it” at work. “Battling” disease. Declaring a “war” on drugs. “Targeting” the right market.
Even when we are not speaking about war, so much of our language still imagines life as combat.
And our words matter.
A culture of peace would also change how we treat vulnerability. It would mean refusing to exploit weakness, whether in people, animals, or ecosystems.
Respect for life has to include life that cannot defend itself. Not just life that has leverage.
And perhaps education would change too. This is something I have already seen in practice, so we can move beyond the abstract and into peace as a living, working practice.
When in the Philippines a while ago, I had the pleasure to visit a daycare, junior school, and high school where peace was at the core of the curriculum. Integrated into all classes from art to science to mathematics.
The school started out as a daycare and quickly evolved into a junior school. Before long, those students graduating needed further education. The popularity of the school and its curriculum paved way to the development of a high school. With further growth plans.
And I remember being fascinated by that. The way it was introduced to me was how practical it was. Peace was not treated as an abstract ideal, but as a living skill. Something children could practise, question, imagine, and carry into how they understood themselves and each other.
Not just teaching children how to compete, achieve, and win, but how to repair, listen, regulate, disagree, grieve, apologise, coexist, and care without disappearing.
Peace Is Not Passive
I think this reflection has given me a lot of food for thought about my own behaviours. Not in a negative way. Not in an “achieve the impossible” way. But in the conscious effort kind of way. The ongoing effort to keep making realistic, small changes to the way I think, speak, and act.
I would love to say I respect all life. And that is something I do try to live towards.
Yet we live inside systems and beliefs that often do the opposite. And to survive, at times, we are forced to participate in the very systems we are trying to change.
But I can make the micro choices.
What I eat. The clothes I buy. The companies I support. How I show up for friends, family, neighbours, and those in need. How I build community as a practice, not just an idea.
Although I may not have a final definition of what I understand peace to be, writing this article has brought me closer to understanding what it is not.
Peace is not passive. Peace is not something we wait for after conflict or war. Peace is not avoiding conflict or pretending harm does not exist. Peace without truth is not peace.
And sadly, what I feel we are seeing more and more is that peace without justice is often just silence enforced by power.
Maybe This Is Where Peace Begins
To build a culture of peace might feel like fantasy to some. But like many of our global injustices, we already have so much of what we need. We have knowledge. We have resources. We have imagination. We have the ability to change what we normalise.
As I arrived back in The Hague and walked home through its leafy green streets on a sunny day, I noticed a couple more “Just Peace” posters hanging in people’s windows. A small growing movement of people asking for a more just and peaceful world.
I certainly don’t think I am the first person to go down this thought process. But as I arrived back to my neighbourhood I thought: I wonder what it would take to get my whole street talking about peace.
Could this be where peace begins?
FAQ's - Building a Culture of Peace
What does “peace as relationship” mean?
The article explores the idea that peace is not simply the absence of war, but a daily practice rooted in care, coexistence, justice, and respect for all life.
What is meant by a “culture of peace”?
A culture of peace refers to social values, behaviours, education, and systems that encourage cooperation, empathy, emotional regulation, non violence, and mutual respect rather than domination or control.
Why does the article connect peace to everyday life?
The reflection argues that peace is shaped not only by governments and institutions, but by everyday behaviours, language, relationships, consumption, and how societies treat vulnerability.
Why does the article discuss genocide and militarisation?
The piece recognises that current public conversations around peace are deeply connected to calls for an end to genocide, militarisation, displacement, and mass violence.
Why is The Hague mentioned in the article?
The article reflects on living in The Hague, internationally known as the “City of Peace and Justice,” self declared and marketed by the city, while questioning what peace truly means culturally and politically.
A note on process and AI assistance: This week's article is based on my own lived experience, reflections and original draft. I used AI lightly - primarily to test flow, the FAQ section and technical webpage optimisation. The final idea, words, structure and editorial choices are my own.
Gregg Hone
Gregg Hone aka Gregg the Artivist is a climate storyteller, artist, and activist using the power of creativity to challenge systems of injustice and inspire meaningful change. Working at the intersection of climate and social justice, Gregg creates content that is bold, accessible, emotionally resonant — and deeply human.
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Very interesting. The distinction between peace as the absence of war, and peace as something actively lived, feels simple when you read it, but I don’t think I’d ever quite separated those two things before. The line “peace without justice is often just silence enforced by power” is one I’ll be thinking about for a while.
What I appreciate most is the question you leave open. Not just what peace means politically, but what it asks of us personally, in how we speak, consume, relate.
Thank you
I think the most honest thing for me writing this was realising I hadn’t really separated those two ideas either until recently. I think that’s partly why the reflection stayed with me for so long before I wrote it.
The more I sat with the word “peace,” the more I realised how often we reduce it to the absence of visible violence, without questioning the wider systems, relationships, and everyday behaviours that shape the conditions for harm in the first place.
And I think that personal part matters too. Not in a guilt or purity sense, but in recognising that culture is built through millions of ordinary interactions, habits, values, and choices.
Really appreciate you taking the time to reflect so deeply on it. Comments like this genuinely help me keep thinking too.
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