# Engineering for Peace and Diplomacy
## 2 Positive Peace  
The noble goal of promoting lasting and sustainable peace for all people have been topics of intense discussion by various governmental and nongovernmental organizations since the publication of _An Agenda for Peace_ by the United Nations [14]. This document helped to define the concepts of preventive diplomacy, peacemaking, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding. Since 1992, multiple documents and policy statements have been written to clarify the nature of peace and how it relates to development and global security. For example, the explicit goal of Sustainable Development Goal 16 (Peace, Justiceand Strong Institutions) is to \"Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels\". In the conflict management and peace and conflict studies literature, peace is presented as a general concept that can mean different things to different people. According to [PERSON] and [PERSON] [15], peace can be analyzed as a state or process whether one is interested in peacekeeping, peacemaking, and/or peacebuilding. One certainty is that \"peace is not... a measurable commodity. It must be seen instead as a potential, a possibility, an ever-changing condition... a direction in which to head, one step at a time\" (bid). Peace and other development-related states such as health, well-being, sustainability, or resilience are difficult to conceptualize. The peace research literature often refers to the work of [PERSON] who pioneered the concepts of negative and positive peace in the early 1960s, two aspects of peace whose definitions have evolved [16]. In short, _negative peace_ relates to an _absence_ of war and direct or organized violence. It implies that something undesirable (personal violence) ceases to exist. _Positive peace_ relates to a _presence_ and _prevalence_ of positive attributes, conditions, and priorities that promote \"social and economic justice, environmental integrity, human rights, and development\" [15] contributing to the structural \"integration of human society\" [17]. A useful analogy suggested by [PERSON] is that negative and positive peace is to peace what _curative_ and _preventive_ measures are to health. Ensuring the security of water, energy, land, food, shelter, and health resources through capacity building; improving access to skills and resources; promoting the rule of law, good governance, social justice, and equality and economic equity; and creating mechanisms for populations to address and recover from conflicts in a constructive manner are as crucial for positive peace as the absence of direct personal violence. To both positive and negative peace, [PERSON] [18] introduced the concept of _cultural peace_ as the \"aspects of a culture that serve to justify and legitimize direct [negative] peace and structural [positive] peace\". In a culture of peace, all three aspects of peace interact with each other and form, according to [PERSON] [18] a 'peace triangle' rather than a 'violence triangle'. As remarked by [PERSON], peace can start at any corner of the triangle and propagate to the other corners as shown in Figure 1.  
Several institutions have tried to capture the multidimensional aspect of positive peace. For instance, the Institute for Economy and Peace [19] in Sydney, Australia, defines positive peace as \"the attitudes, institutions, and structures that create and sustain peaceful societies\". It is seen as creating \"an optimum environment in which human potential can flourish\". According to the IEP, this optimum environment is founded on eight interdependent pillars: \"well-functioning government; sound business environment; equitable distribution of resources; acceptance of the rights of others; good relations with neighbors; free flow of information; high levels of human capital; and low levels  
Figure 1: Peace can start at any corner of the peace triangle and propagate to the other corners.