Elise Boulding Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

Page 3 of 3

Peace Research

If we set as our goal the training of peacemakers, looking at future generations, what contribution can peace research make?

One way of putting what I've been talking about is doing a different mapping of the nature of the international system. It's very important that scholars do that mapping, and that means mapping the state systems, the intergovernmental agreement system, the nongovernmental, and so on. Then another is understanding conflict processes, the dynamics of conflict processes, and the range of conflict-resolving behavior, of which deterrence is one.

One way to deal with a problem is you threaten the other guy and you say, if you don't do things the way I want, I'll wham you. Then there is a whole range of negotiation processes: mediation, arbitration, negotiation, exchange, which we use in everyday life but we do not begin to apply to the maximum possible in international relations. And then there are the more integrative solutions, like developing a regime. A regime means there are regulatory authorities and understanding about substances, how you handle water and air pollution, and so on. And finally, of course, you have close integrative systems, like in the Nordic community. Norway, Sweden, Denmark have some very tightly integrated intergovernmental [agreements.] All of those options are open to us, and yet we spend all of our time down at the deterrence, the threat, and we ignore [the other options]. So peace research is trying to look at opening up all these options of other ways of doing problem solving, and under what conditions you can do them, what mechanisms you need, and how you get people to define situations in new ways.

Should we be teaching this to our youngsters before we have the answer? What is the process of having a continuous educational process -- building peace studies programs on university campuses, for example?

Absolutely. It's been happening of course. Here in California, the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation is a wonderful model for the country, because every state now has a state university system, and California is the first one to introduce research and training in these fields. So I hope that the other 49 states go along.

So, on the one hand, the kinds of things we've been talking about are the subject matter of peace studies. Different schools specialize in different things. Some will specialize in understanding how UN agencies function and others focus more on nonviolent behavior and others more on mediation. Each program needs to follow its own strengths. But having the National Peace Institute now means a national legitimization for training in this other type of analysis of conflict situations and training in mediation skills. So that was the intention; I served on the commission that drafted the basic document that became the Peace Institute. The intention was to make it possible for soldiers to retrain into negotiation skills, away from direct military action skills, and for people in federal government to go for mid-career retraining, as well as bringing up a host of new professionals who have these new skills. And it happens that mediation is probably one of the fastest growing professions in the United States today, all the way from family -- divorce mediation and so on -- to international mediators who work within the international community, because they have to do a lot of mediation in the multinationals.

So we have that social current going for us, that people are seeing that we can't just get away with threats all the time, we have to do more n egotiation. And so, with the federal government sponsoring that in the National Peace Institute, and with peace studies programs which, eventually, should be getting some grants from the National Peace Institute, it's my hope -- it's provided for in the legislation -- that they could be contracting with local campuses to do research and training on the campuses.

In these areas that we've been talking about, peace process, peacemaking, peace research, peace movements, what distinctive contribution have women made, and why?

I mentioned at the very beginning of our conversation that when women became mobilized, realizing the danger to their babies in 1960-61, that they linked with scientists, and that was the beginning of a process. While women have always been in peace movements and have always had the responsibility of protecting their families (and war isn't very protective of families), the gradual shift over the last several decades, which has paralleled the Women's Movement itself, has been to claim more public roles for peace processes and do it less as the housewife that takes off her apron and opens the door and says, "Hey, we must have peace," but more to claim public space, to be involved in discussions about alternative security process.

A certain number of women, not enough, [are] going into that field, which has been an all men's field, the field of international security. There are no women on the National Security Council, but the time will come that there will be, because more women, not in great droves, but more women are moving into that. And women are taking a lot of leadership, not just in the women's peace movement, but in the church peace movements and these occupational and special-interest peace movements, because they have claimed the public space. They're not saying any longer, "I'm just a housewife, I don't know about these things, but I want peace"; they're saying, "Here are the conditions for peace." And as scholars and as policy analysts they bring the ability to always go back and forth between systems analysis and individuals. Numbers mean people, and that's something that women seem to be able to remember better than men. It isn't that men aren't capable of having that perception. Thank God that some of them do. But women are more apt to continually make that translation back and forth. And therefore, when women scholars work on these systems, they are more apt to ground it in the human condition and what will make the human condition better.

Professor Boulding, thank you very much for joining us today for this fascinating conversation on the work of peace. And thank you very much for being with us today.

To the Conversations page

To the Peace Movement research gallery