Johan Galtung - Suvarnacollection

Johan Galtung (born 24 October 1930) is a Norwegian sociologist, mathematician and the principal founder of the discipline of peace and conflict studies.

He was the main founder of the Peace Research Institute Oslo in 1959 and served as its first director until 1970. He also established the Journal of Peace Research in 1964. In 1969 he was appointed to the world's first chair in peace and conflict studies, at the University of Oslo. He resigned his Oslo professorship in 1977 and has since held professorships at several other universities; from 1993 to 2000 he taught as Distinguished Professor of Peace Studies at the University of Hawaii, and he is currently based in Kuala Lumpur, where he is the first Tun Mahathir Professor of Global Peace at the International Islamic University Malaysia.

Galtung is known for contributions to mathematics[citation needed] and sociology in the 1950s, political science in the 1960s, economics and history in the 1970s, macro history, anthropology and theology in the 1980s. He has developed several influential theories, such as the distinction between positive and negative peace, structural violence, theories on conflict and conflict resolution, the concept of peacebuilding, the structural theory of imperialism, and the theory of the United States as simultaneously a republic and an empire. He has often been critical of western countries in their attitude to the Global South. Galtung has been a major intellectual figure of the New Left since the 1950s. He was awarded the Right Livelihood Award in 1987 and has received many other prizes and accolades.
Source: Wikipedia