Emmanuel Iniobong Archibong, Remigius Achinike Obah
Abstract
The study interrogates the provisions of peace in African worldview from the perspective of the hierarchy of force. Force in African worldview is unique in so many ways in that it captures the different categorizations of being. Johan Galtung sees peace from two points of view. The first is positive peace which is peace as stability, equilibrium or the internal states of a human being which corresponds to all good things in the world community particularly cooperation and integration between human groups. The second is peace as the absence of organized violence between major human groups also known as negative peace. The second category of peace is the major capture of this study. The study, employing the method of critical analysis, examines the hierarchy of force in the traditional African worldview, from where it argues that peace as the absence of organized violence can be extrapolated by reason of man being at the centre of creation. Deductively then, man’s life ought only to be strengthened by a means other than himself or his fellow man. Hence, in the case where Africans particularly get involved in war, violent conflict, hostility and bloodletting among themselves, it becomes an aberration and a contradiction since they are all connected with one another and share a common destiny. This position can also be applied to human preservation everywhere (East and West) on the face of the earth, thereby checking wanton destruction of lives through violent conflicts.
Keywords: Violent Conflict, Peace, Force, Reality, Brotherhood
