On October 7, 2023, Hamas militants launched an attack from the blockaded Gaza strip in western Israel, killing a reported 1,200 people, including women and children, and taking an estimated 240 hostages (see Boxerman 2023). The attacks prompted a fast and intense response from the Israeli government. Israel Defense Forces (IDF) began intensive aerial assaults of Gaza soon after the attack, followed by a ground invasion. As of late December 2023, the conflict remains ongoing, with the Gaza Health Ministry reporting nearly 20,000 fatalities and an additional 52,500 causalities (AJLabs 2023).

In some ways, this conflict came as a surprise. The initial assault resulted in the largest number of civilian casualties since Israel’s founding in 1948. In other ways, however, this most recent escalation of hostilities was expected. From the Balfour Declaration in 1917, in which British government officials announced their support for creating a Jewish state in Ottoman-controlled Palestine, to the creation of the state of Israel by the United Nations in 1948 and onward, peace between Israel and its neighbors (both internal and external) has been fragile. The day after Israel declared statehood in 1948, for example, five Arab countries and Israel were at war. Israel was at war or engaged in conflict with its neighbors in 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, and 2006. The country experienced significant internal conflicts in 1987 and 2000 with the first and second Intifadas, or civil uprisings (see Bregman 2016 for a comprehensive overview of these conflicts).

The historical situation in Israel may be described as one of “unstable peace,” where although a nation is not at war, war or conflict is a relevant possibility. Periods of relative peace are punctuated by periods of violence. Between 2001 and 2023, for example, excluding the most recent conflict, thousands of rocket or mortar attacks on Israel were documented (American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise 2023). Despite being clear acts of violence, these attacks did not lead to war—either within Israel or in the region. This history, combined with the contemporary war in Israel, generates a myriad of questions. Why did the delicate peace between Israel and Hamas-controlled Gaza break down? Why not sooner? How do we explain the movement from peace to war and from war to peace? How is it that some countries or regions appear caught in a sort of contentious quagmire—not truly at peace, but not truly at war? Where are the fault lines that move nations from one status to the other?

These broader questions about movements between war and peace were engaged directly by the late Kenneth Boulding. Boulding is well known in several fields, particularly in the arenas of defense and peace economics and peace and conflict studies. He co-founded the Journal of Conflict Resolution in 1957, and established the Center for Research on Conflict Resolution in 1959. His book Conflict and Defense: A General Theory (1962) is a foundational text in the field of defense and peace economics. The author of dozens of books and hundreds of papers, Boulding’s work spanned economics, peace studies, philosophy, and political science, weaving together both similar and disparate threads of inquiry to better understand the dynamics of peace and war. As Alshamy and Coyne (2023, 239) note in their work on Boulding’s legacy, “What made Boulding so unique as an intellectual—the scope, diversity, and eclecticism of his scholarship—also makes it difficult to neatly categorize him and his ideas into a single school of thought in a single discipline.”

The purpose of this paper is to explore the themes, tensions, and possible extensions of one of Boulding’s books, Stable Peace, published by the University of Texas Press in 1978. The book offers readers a framework for understanding peace and war, as well as the movements between these states. I proceed as follows. I first provide an overview of the book, discussing its main frameworks and themes. Next, I turn to a discussion of the book’s influence and how Stable Peace has figured into historical and contemporary discussions of peace and conflict. I then discuss tensions in the book and offer areas of possible expansion for future research before offering concluding remarks.

KEYWORDS: Kenneth Boulding, Stable Peace, War