Boston Research Center for the 21st Century: 1995 Global Citizens Awards

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, July, 1996 by Elise Boulding, Albert Carnesale, Kevin Clements, John D. Montgomery

Fred Polak's Image of the Future, which she translated, fuelled Elise's interests in the power of imagination to change behavior. Not content just to theorize about such matters she has facilitated a large number of workshops aimed at promoting positive approaches to peace and delineating the powerful components of what she calls the image-action nexus.

For all who are dominated by time, (and who isn't in this sort of society) Elise has researched different orientations to time and new ways of conceptualizing it. Her idea of a two hundred year present helps all of us to situate ourselves in lengthier time spans, "remembering" both the past and the future while acting in the present. This concept of time, that "it is the moving portrait of eternity," provides important cautionary lessons for all public and private decision makers, especially for those based in Washington where, contrary to most laws of physics, sound always seems to travel faster than light.

V

Elise Boulding

- Towards a Culture of Peace in the Twenty-first Century -

While preparing these remarks I came to the conclusion that the only way I could talk about peace culture in the twenty-first century was by placing us in that larger present. It's so easy today to be overcome by the turbulence of events. I felt that using the two hundred year present to talk about changing the world towards peace, justice, love, and sharing was the only way to build adequately on what is already happening. After all, we are not inventing peace from scratch. People have been at it for centuries and centuries. And to talk about the two hundred year present as something we are present in, you and I, means that we have these colleagues and coworkers that link us to experience larger than our own life span.

The two hundred year present begins, of course, on November 3, 1895, the year in which people who are celebrating their hundredth birthday today were born. The other boundary of the two hundred year present is November 3, 2095, when babies born today will reach their hundredth birthday. That period includes people who have been or will be part of our lives - from our grandparents and great grandparents through our grandchildren and great grandchildren, and we are all participants in the creation of a better world. Our Native American brothers and sisters talk about planning for the seventh generation, but I would like to extend that to ten - five generations back and five forward.

One of the things that astonished me as I began reading about the first half of this period - the end of the last century and the early part of this century - was what a vibrant movement there was in peace education. Teachers and community workers in Europe, Asia, and the Americas were just discovering a new way to teach. There was also the vibrancy and excitement of the movement for international law and for arbitration and dispute settlement. We assume we invented those things in our era, but they were already a big thing in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Of course, we also came into this century on the wave of hope and expectation stirred by the Hague Peace Conference and the founding of the International Court of Justice at the Hague. In India, in parts of Africa and other parts of Asia, nonviolent autonomy movements had also come into being. Gandhi was very important, but it was not only Gandhi. In other words, a lot was going on that we have inherited and that we can build on as we move forward in our work with conflict resolution and on the problems of creating an adequate body of law for the international system, and as we develop our practice of nonviolence in the face of violence.