We’ve built entire governments around this misconception. Our institutions operate as if peace were simply the absence of visible conflict—a kind of societal cease-fire maintained through laws, enforcement, and the occasional diplomatic handshake. It’s a tidy framework, born from Enlightenment thinking, and it’s served us reasonably well for managing the mechanics of order. But something essential is missing from this picture, something that might explain why our most carefully crafted policies often feel hollow, why communities remain fractured despite legal reconciliation, and why the unrest keeps bubbling up from beneath our well-intentioned surface treatments.
Wolfgang Dietrich, an Austrian peace researcher whose work has quietly revolutionized how we think about conflict resolution, offers a different vision. He calls it “transrational peace,” and it’s based on a simple but profound insight: peace isn’t singular, it’s plural. There isn’t one peace to be achieved; there are many peaces to be cultivated, each shaped by culture, relationship, emotion, and yes—spirit. It’s a framework that doesn’t abandon reason but transcends it, weaving together the rational with the deeply human elements our technocratic age often dismisses as soft or irrelevant.
This matters more than you might think, particularly for a country like Australia that’s grappling with the enduring wounds of colonization, the complexity of multiculturalism, and the growing recognition that our institutional approaches to justice, education, and social healing aren’t quite hitting the mark. What if the problem isn’t that we need better policies, but that we need a fundamentally different understanding of what peace actually is?
The Many Faces of Peace
Dietrich’s contribution to peace studies reads like an anthropologist’s love letter to human diversity. Instead of seeking the one true formula for peace, he traced how different cultures and historical periods have understood what it means to live in harmony. What he found was fascinating: peace means completely different things to different people, and those differences aren’t accidental—they’re foundational.
Indigenous communities might understand peace as harmony with Country, with ancestors, with the intricate web of relationships that connect all living things. It’s energetic, spiritual, embodied. For them, a peace process that ignores ceremony, story, and connection to land isn’t peace at all—it’s just another form of colonization dressed up in diplomatic language.
Religious traditions often frame peace as moral alignment—the triumph of good over evil, or obedience to divine law. It’s about right relationship with the sacred, and any sustainable peace must acknowledge and honor that dimension of human experience.
Modern liberal democracies, the kind most of us live in, tend to see peace through the lens of rational negotiation, legal frameworks, and institutional processes. It’s peace as contract, peace as system, peace as the well-oiled machinery of governance functioning without major breakdowns.
Postmodern thinkers, suspicious of universal truths, focus on whose version of peace gets privileged and whose gets silenced. They ask uncomfortable questions about power, discourse, and the narratives we tell ourselves about progress and justice.
Dietrich’s genius was recognizing that none of these approaches are wrong—they’re just incomplete. The energetic peace of Indigenous wisdom, the moral clarity of religious traditions, the institutional sophistication of liberal democracy, the critical analysis of postmodern thought—they all capture something true about the human experience of harmony and conflict. But when any one approach dominates, when we pretend there’s only one legitimate way to understand peace, we inevitably exclude and alienate the very people we’re trying to include in our vision of social harmony.
This is what he means by “transrational”—not irrational, not anti-rational, but beyond the merely rational. It’s an approach that includes logic and evidence but doesn’t stop there. It recognizes that humans are complex beings who navigate the world through story, symbol, relationship, emotion, and meaning-making in ways that can’t be reduced to data points or policy mechanisms.
Where Good Intentions Fall Short
Walk into any government department tasked with addressing social problems, and you’ll find dedicated professionals armed with evidence-based strategies, stakeholder consultation processes, and outcome measurement frameworks. These people genuinely care about making things better, and their methods often work—up to a point.
Take urban unrest, for instance. A rationalist approach focuses on crime statistics, policing strategies, and economic incentives. It’s not wrong to address these factors, but it often misses the deeper currents of grief, humiliation, and disconnection that fuel social explosions. You can have perfect crime data and still completely miss the community trauma that makes certain neighborhoods feel like powder kegs.
Or consider the peace accords that international mediators broker with such careful attention to power-sharing formulas and economic arrangements. Bosnia, South Sudan, Colombia—the technical details are often impressive, but the agreements keep unraveling because they don’t address what the conflict meant to people, how it shaped their identity, what stories they tell their children about who they are and who their enemies are. You can’t negotiate meaning; you can only create space for it to be shared, witnessed, and perhaps transformed.
Australia has its own version of this challenge. We’ve made legal progress on Indigenous rights, established compensation schemes, created formal apologies. These matter enormously, and they represent genuine moral progress. But without the deeper work of relational healing—without making space for ceremony, for storytelling, for the kind of cultural engagement that honors Indigenous ways of knowing—these efforts can feel procedural rather than transformative. Justice without empathy, reconciliation without relationship.
The limitation isn’t malicious; it’s structural. Our institutions are designed to manage problems, not to heal wounds. They’re built for efficiency and accountability, not for the slow, messy work of restoring trust and dignity. They operate in the realm of policy, not presence.
This is where transrational thinking offers something different. It doesn’t dismiss the importance of good policy, but it recognizes that sustainable peace requires attention to the relational, cultural, and spiritual dimensions of human experience that policy alone can’t address.
Peace as Living Process
What would governance look like if we treated society not as a machine to be managed but as a living system to be tended? This shift in metaphor is more than poetic; it’s practical. Machines are predictable, controllable, efficient. Living systems are adaptive, relational, emergent. They require different kinds of attention and different kinds of care.
In education, this might mean moving beyond standardized testing toward curricula that develop emotional literacy, cultural competence, and what we might call “peace skills”—the ability to listen deeply, to hold multiple perspectives, to navigate conflict in ways that strengthen rather than fragment relationships. Schools would become places where young people learn not just facts but how to be in right relationship with themselves, their communities, and the broader world.
In the justice system, it might mean expanding restorative and transformative approaches that bring offenders, victims, and community members together to address not just the legal facts of a case but its relational impact. What was broken? What’s needed for repair? How can accountability serve healing rather than just punishment? Some Australian communities are already experimenting with this through Koori Courts and Indigenous sentencing circles, and the results suggest something powerful about the difference between justice as verdict and justice as restoration.
In health policy, it might mean recognizing that trauma—personal and collective—is a public health issue that requires more than clinical intervention. Community healing, cultural practice, storytelling, and ceremony aren’t nice add-ons to “real” healthcare; they’re foundational to the kind of wellbeing that makes other interventions possible.
In foreign affairs, it might mean engaging in diplomacy that honors the symbolic and spiritual dimensions of international conflicts, not just the geopolitical calculations. What sacred sites are at stake? What historical wounds need acknowledgment? What would it mean to negotiate not just interests but dignity?
These aren’t radical departures from good governance; they’re deepenings of it. They represent what happens when policy is informed by a more complete understanding of what humans actually need to thrive in relationship with one another.
Stories from the Ground
The beautiful thing about transrational peace is that it’s not just theory—it’s already happening, often in places where conventional approaches have reached their limits.
In southern Mexico, the Zapatista Indigenous communities have spent decades developing what they call “good government”—decision-making processes rooted in consensus, cultural practice, and what they describe as “walking at the pace of the slowest.” Their assemblies don’t just vote on policies; they create space for storytelling, for emotional expression, for the kind of deep listening that allows community wisdom to emerge. It’s not perfect, and it’s not easily replicable, but it demonstrates that governance can be both effective and relational.
South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, for all its limitations, showed what’s possible when official processes make room for testimony, ritual, and the African philosophy of Ubuntu—the understanding that we are who we are through our relationships with others. Victims and perpetrators came together not just to establish facts but to share stories, to witness pain, to explore the possibilities of forgiveness. It didn’t solve everything, but it prevented civil war and created a foundation for ongoing healing work.
In New Zealand, the integration of Māori worldviews into justice processes has opened up alternatives to purely punitive approaches. Marae-based justice, where legal proceedings happen in sacred communal spaces guided by elders and cultural protocol, offers a glimpse of what it might look like to address wrongdoing within a framework of relationship and accountability to community.
Colombia’s peace process with the FARC gets most of the international attention, but it’s the grassroots reconciliation work happening in rural communities that embodies transrational principles most fully. Women’s groups using body memory workshops to process trauma. Communities convening storytelling circles to reweave social fabric torn by decades of violence. Local peace laboratories where people experiment with new forms of dialogue across difference.
These examples share common elements: they make space for multiple ways of knowing, they honor the emotional and spiritual dimensions of conflict, they prioritize relationship over transaction, and they trust in people’s capacity to find their own paths toward healing when given appropriate support and facilitation.
A Ministry for What Matters Most
This brings us to an intriguing possibility: what would it mean for Australia to establish a Ministry for Peace rooted in these transrational principles? Not just another government department, but a different kind of institutional space—one designed to tend the relational infrastructure that makes all other policies possible.
Such a ministry wouldn’t compete with existing departments but would work across them, asking different questions. Not just “What programs will reduce crime?” but “What conditions support community healing?” Not just “How do we manage diversity?” but “How do we honor and integrate different ways of knowing?” Not just “What’s the most efficient approach?” but “What approach serves human dignity?”
It would be staffed not just by policy professionals but by practitioners of the arts of relationship: mediators and storytellers, ceremony holders and community organizers, trauma specialists and cultural educators. It would operate with different timelines, recognizing that healing happens at its own pace. It would measure success differently, paying attention to indicators of trust, belonging, and collective wellbeing that don’t show up in conventional metrics.
The ministry would facilitate truth-telling processes that go beyond legal acknowledgment to create space for story, witness, and cultural expression. It would support community-led peacebuilding initiatives that emerge from local wisdom rather than top-down strategic planning. It would advise other departments on the peace impact of their policies, asking whether proposed changes strengthen or weaken the social fabric.
Most importantly, it would embody a different relationship between government and citizen—one based on partnership rather than service delivery, on listening rather than managing, on trust rather than control.
This isn’t naive idealism; it’s sophisticated realism about what actually works in an era when traditional approaches to governance are struggling to address the complexity of human experience in diverse societies. The crises we face—polarization, disconnection, the erosion of social trust—require responses that go deeper than policy adjustment. They require attention to what we might call the soul of society: the stories we tell about who we are, the quality of relationship between different groups, the sense of meaning and belonging that makes people want to contribute to something larger than themselves.
The Courage to Go Deeper
There’s something almost subversive about suggesting that government should concern itself with relationships, emotions, and spiritual dimensions of human experience. We’re trained to think of these as private matters, outside the proper scope of public policy. But this separation is relatively recent, historically speaking, and it may be unsustainable.
Indigenous cultures never made sharp distinctions between the political, the spiritual, and the relational. For them, governance was always about maintaining right relationship—with each other, with the land, with the ancestors, with future generations. It was ceremony and story and law all woven together into a coherent whole.
We don’t need to go back to some imagined golden age, but we might need to go forward to a more integrated understanding of what government is for. Not just the management of competing interests, but the cultivation of conditions where human beings can flourish in relationship with one another and with the Earth that sustains us all.
This is the promise of transrational peace: not peace as the absence of conflict, but peace as the presence of justice, dignity, belonging, and meaning. Not peace as a destination to be reached, but peace as a practice to be cultivated day by day, relationship by relationship, story by story.
It’s more complex than what we’re used to, messier than traditional policy frameworks can easily handle. But complexity isn’t the enemy—oversimplification is. The challenges we face as communities and as a species require all of our intelligence: rational and emotional, individual and collective, ancient and emergent.
The question isn’t whether we can afford to embrace this broader understanding of peace. The question is whether we can afford not to.
After all, the old ways of doing things got us to where we are today. If we want to get somewhere different—somewhere more whole, more just, more sustainable—we might need to be willing to think differently about the very foundations of how we organize our common life.
That conversation is already happening in communities around the world. The only question is whether our institutions will be brave enough to join it.
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