Johan Galtung 1930-2024

A memorial site in the making for the world-renowned peace and future researcher, social scientist and peace-maker.

This site aims to present and remember Norwegian-born social scientist, Johan Vincent Galtung – his background, production, and importance – and also to provide people with an opportunity to express their gratitude.

It was launched in a first edition on February 17, 2025, one year after his death.

Johan’s lifelong commitment to social science and peace is too productive, diverse, and restless to squeeze into one memorial site. I attempt to merely skate the surface this first year and then develop it over time. It will probably never do him justice.

Johan was one of my mentors – together with Aage Bertelsen and Håkan Wiberg. He was a dear friend and colleague over exactly 50 years and a TFF Associate from 1986 until his death.

This site represents a tiny token of my gratitude to him.

Jan Oberg,
Dr h.c., director & co-founder

TFF • The Transnational Foundation for Peace & Future Research

“I have never been an advocate of world-saving narratives. The point about my work is to identify the neuralgic, specific contradiction in a specific place in space and at a specific moment in time and dissolve the contradiction with conflict transformation in order to prevent an escalation of whatever social contradiction one is dealing with into violence, whether direct or structural.
To ask me whether I want to save the world is to have understood nothing about how conflict transformation works in practice. It’s like suggesting that a brain surgeon would want to extract a patient’s entire brain instead of working on the specific complication identified and localized in a specific region of the cerebral cortex. No, that is no way to proceed.
One identifies concrete underlying contradictions in the social system at hand, then one identifies the causes, its drivers, and strives to undo the harm and hurt that could result from it by nonviolent means.
I am not concerned with saving the world – I am concerned with finding solutions to specific conflicts before they become violent.” — Johan Galtung.