Elise Boulding Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Professor Boulding, welcome to Berkeley.
Thank you.
I thought we might begin with the topic of peace movements. How has the character of late 20th century peace movements been evolving?
We have always had a type of mass peace movement, where people are massing to protest particular wars or particular arms policies, and then you get a peak and then a decline after the peak. People don't stay mobilized. What's happening now is that groups are becoming mobilized based on their occupations and the interests that are central to their lives. And so instead of just leaving what they are normally doing and going out to protest and demonstrate, they are now continuing a level of activity and concern. Some examples that I would give -- perhaps the most notable one is the Physicians for Social Responsibility, when doctors started using their knowledge as medical scientists to look at what nuclear war meant; then that became a use of their professional skills and not simply a mobilization of their political opinions. The International Federation of Scientists doing their work on nuclear winter is another example of using their professional knowledge as scientists. But it isn't just scientists that do this. The peace research movement is that kind of mobilization of social scientists, but it's also artists and musicians and poets, theater people, social workers, teachers. The terms "Educators for Social Responsibility," "Architects for Social Responsibility," "Lawyers for Social Responsibility," indicate that sector by sector, including in the business community and including parents -- you know, "Mothers for Peace," parents concerned about the threat of nuclear war -- [people are mobilizing] based on things which are central to their lives. They're saying, "How can we use what we know to create the conditions for a peaceful world in which the nuclear threat has been removed?"
What accounts for this particular form of mobilization?
I think it's a very positive adaptive response to their own perception that simply saying, "we don't want war," doesn't produce any results, that you can't mobilize in a vacuum and simply make a political statement in a vacuum. We did that in World War I, we did it in World War II, we did it in Vietnam, and people are now instinctively feeling that more is required than a straight political statement, although the political statement is very important. And so they're asking themselves -- this is certainly true of my generation of social scientists: "How can we use sociology to understand the conditions of peace, the structures, the mechanisms that are needed for peace?" And that was a kind of question that hadn't been asked before.
So what that means for peace movements is that after you've had the peak of political mobilization, people don't just go home and return to business as usual, because working on the conditions of peace has become part of business as usual. So you get the peak and then, instead of going way down, you stay at a higher level of continued, sustained activity in relation to peace processes.
Next page: Goals of Peace Movements
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