This book presents more than 1,000 entries organized in twenty-six major categories in the fields of conflict and peace studies. It focuses on global systems and covers the structures and processes of conflict and peacemaking as they apply at every level from interpersonal to international.
This volume honors the lifetime achievements of the distinguished activist and scholar Elise Boulding (1920-2010) on the occasion of her 95th birthday. Known as the "matriarch" of the twentieth century peace research movement, she made significant contributions in the fields of peace education, future studies, feminism, and sociology of the family, and as a prominent leader in the peace movement and the Society of Friends. She taught at the University of Colorado, Boulder from 1967 to 1978 and at Dartmouth College from 1978 to 1985, and was instrumental in the development of peace studies programs at both institutions. She was a co-founder of the International Peace Research Association (1964), the Consortium on Peace Research Education and Development (1970), and various peace and women's issues-related committees and working groups of the American Sociological Association and International Sociological Association.
For Panel on "Is America a Forgiving Place?" at Inangural Conference, Toward a Deeper Understanding of Forgiveness, Center for Religion, Ethics, and Culture, College of the Holy Cross, Septemper 15, 2001. The history of the traditions of nonviolence in America beginning with William Penn's Holy Experiment is discussed briefly and is related to the United Nations'declaration of a Decade of Education for a Culture of Peace and Nonviolence. Current movements including the restorative justice movement and community‐based mediation; dialogue; and nonviolence training and peace action, as well as the growing field of peace research and peace studies, are reviewed in light of their potential for further development of peace culture in the United States.
The inspiration for this essay came to me after a daylong workshop on Imagining a Nonviolent World which I offered for prisoners at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Norfolk on a wintry Saturday morning. This type of imaging workshop first evolved in the late 1970s, as I began to realize that we peace activists, working to bring about a nonviolent world without war, really had no idea how a world in which armies had disappeared would function. How could we work to bring about something we could not even see in our imaginations? Stepping back into the 1950s in my own mind, I remembered translating Fred Polak's Image of the Future from the Dutch original, a macrohistorical analysis that showed a war-paralyzed and depressed Europe how past societies in bad situations but with positive images of the future had been empowered by their own imaginations to work to bring the imaged future about. Here was a possible answer!