Peace is a nebulous concept in political discourse. The Global Peace Index offers a solution by providing an empirically led measurement of peace informed by Johan Galtung’s (1930-2024) typology of violence. This typology is structured around personal and structural violence. The paper presents that this expansion of the concept of violence is philosophically unwarranted and leads to conceptual inflation that undermines clarity in both normative and empirical contexts. Specifically, I argue that violence should be restricted to personal violence, where so-called structural violence does not meet the conceptual criteria for violence. This claim shall be substantiated through a critical evaluation of the Global Peace Index, exploring the philosophical concepts behind violence such as intent and moral luck. I offer the view that the structures supporting violence ought to be deinstitutionalised, while critiquing the coherence of treating such societal structures as instances of violence themselves. Narrowing the scope of the typology of violence preserves the moral urgency of addressing structural influence without distorting the concept of violence. This view accommodates empirical tools for assessing peacefulness like the Global Peace Index, while also drawing stricter epistemological boundaries around how we can measure peace.
