This famous passage from The Theory of Moral Sentiments has long informed the mainline tradition in political economy, from its critiques of domestic politics (Ostrom 1999) to international relations (Coyne 2023). Centralization and rationalization in the style of Woodrow Wilson has repeatedly steamrolled over stubborn on-the-ground realities, attempting to impose order rather than fostering the conditions for its emergence.

In this essay, we add to the recent literature on peace studies in the mainline tradition by revisiting a classic text, Elise Boulding’s Cultures of Peace (2000), and opening dialogue with two further areas of research. Boulding wrote in 2000, emphasizing culture rather than central planning, which contributed to shifting peace studies away from Wilsonian liberalism towards postliberal peace and the “local turn” movement. We first explain what we mean by culture, peace, and polycentricity, highlighting insights from peace scholars such as John Paul Lederach and Scott Appleby, who point to the need for a form of peacemaking or justpeace that is bottom-up and organic rather than imperialistic and technocratic. Second, we turn to the ethics literature in our own Catholic-Christian tradition to offer an account of what it is to be, and how one becomes, a peaceable person who can build practices and institutions to support cultures of peace. Third, and finally, we consider five lines of thought which open up in light of this new framing. While beginning with Boulding’s work (2000), we are also inspired by that of Christopher Coyne, and this paper seeks to be an instance of “the type of inter-disciplinary opportunities for studying bottom-up peace and its relevance for understanding a range of issues that directly impact human flourishing and well-being” (Coyne 2023, 28). By situating Boulding’s work alongside other areas of scholarship which may be less familiar to scholars of mainline political economy, our goal is not to prove a single thesis but to begin new conversations.

KEYWORDS: Elise Boulding, Cultures of Peace, Justpeace, Subsidiarity, Polycentricity