Vithal Rajan, Officer, Order of Canada, BA Hons (McGill), PhD (London School of Economics), F.I.N.S, is a Canadian national and OCI. He has worked as an information officer, ICI, Canada; as a mediator for the Church in Belfast in the 1970s; and later as a member of the founding faculty at the School of Peace Studies, University of Bradford, UK; as Chair of World Studies, International School of Geneva; as Director, WWF-International, Switzerland; as founding Executive Director, the Right Livelihood Award Foundation, Sweden (also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize); and as founding Councillor, World Future Council, London, Hamburg and Brussels.
He was a member of the Transcend Global Peace University and the Galtung-Institut. In India he was Senior Faculty, Administrative Staff College of India. He was Board member of Environment Protection Training Research Institute [EPTRI] of Govt of India. He has served on several committees of the departments of rural development, environment, and policy of Govt of Andra Pradesh. He was founder-chair of several well-known Indian NGOs.
In 2006, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada for life-long service to humanity; and is listed in the Canadian Who’s Who.
He has written several papers in Indian and International academic journals, and lectured in several universities. He is an author and playwright.
I first met Johan Galtung at the SALT 1 talks in Helsinki in 1971. He stood out in that crowd of generals and scholars – handsome, elegant, humorous. One could see in an instant that everyone regarded him as an important personage in that conference. And yet to my surprise I found him extremely friendly, and the easiest person to get along with. Within days we became very good friends, and so we remained for the decades to come, though separated by continents and the bruising work schedule he kept for himself. I could always pick up the threads with him as if the intervening passage of time had been but a day.
My participation in SALT 1 was neither intended nor anticipated. I had emigrated from India to Canada seeking the twentieth century, angered by the injustices of tradition, the caste system and patriarchy. Soon to my disgust I was viewing on my TV the most powerful country in the world bombing helpless peasants in Vietnam. To join the peace movement was a natural step. The next natural step was to try and do a doctoral degree at the LSE rather than continue with a cushy corporate job in North America. My friendly doctoral supervisor, Michael Banks, said if I was that much involved with the peace movement then I should meet Johan, and he sent me off to Helsinki.
Johan had many more sides to his character, and his scholarship, than any other person I have known. There was nothing ‘objective’ or distant about his work. His commitment was total, as total as that of a soldier fighting for his country. But it was a larger commitment, to that of all humanity. And he seemed to be guided by the prophetic knowledge of a true Christian. So true a Christian that he seemed to find no barriers to acceptance of other faiths and cultures.
For example, Johan found it quite compatible to recommend to the World Council of Churches and the Pontifical Commission for Justice and Peace that I, a Hindu, should be sent as a track two mediator to Northern Ireland during the ‘troubles’ there. He seemed to see no one as a stranger; all were friends immediately.
His commitment to his own beliefs was as solid as a proverbial rock. He would very simply in straight speech oppose and dismiss ideas he found inimical to humanity, but he never wavered in an equally simple affection for the person he disagreed with. He stood for the South, the poor and exploited of the world; he opposed directly and defiantly the Imperial West and American hegemony and its nascent fascism.
His scholarship for peace activism was anything but ordinary academic work. He reached beyond the confines of academia and in his short ‘equation for peace’ he brings in the concept of ‘empathy’ and that of ‘trauma,’ just as C.G. Jung might have, or as prophets did in the past. Surely, this is very unsettling to the International Relations specialist or the Political-Economist. This messing with categories interferes not only with ‘academic rigour’, but if one went down this path it would do no good with tenures either.
For most scholars, peace studies is an allied subject to the ‘realistic’ discipline of conflict resolution. for Johan ‘peace research’ was much much more than a niche discipline, it was the saving of humanity from the destructive forces that it had unleashed, and in this clarity of thought he was one with the prophets. In him, I was reminded of what Mahatma Gandhi once said, that his life was his message.
The Norwegian committee for the Nobel Peace Prize did not give it to Gandhi, nor did they give it to Galtung, but they did give it to Theodore Roosevelt, then considered the ‘most warlike’ of Presidents by the New York Times, and decades later they were consistent in giving it to Kissinger. Clearly, they share the same world-view as PRIO – Peace Research Institute Oslo – that Johan founded.
Now that I am over 90 years of age, there is very little I can contribute in terms of well researched papers, but I meditate every day, and Johan accompanies me, for I know that prayers may benefit humanity more than scholarship.
I want to thank PRIO for attempting to de-mythologize Johan. It has made me understand sympathetically, at long last, why Caiaphas and his team chose to save Barabbas over Yesu.
Posted October 15, 2026
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