The contributors to this symposium engage the ideas and arguments in three books—Kenneth Boulding’s, Stable Peace (1978), Elise Boulding’s Cultures of Peace: The Hidden Side of History (2000), and my book, In Search of Monsters to Destroy: The Folly of American Empire and the Paths to Peace (Coyne 2022). The common theme across these books is the desire by the authors to understand various aspects of peace between people.

In Stable Peace, Kenneth Boulding (1978) offers a process view of peace and violence. He is interested in understanding how people navigate conflict situations, where one party gains at the expense of another. Conflict situations can be resolved peacefully, as in the case of economic competition in markets, or through violence. Given these possibilities, K. Boulding focuses on the factors that cause transitions from peace to violence (war) and from violence (war) to peace.

The process component of his analysis is grounded in the recognition that peace and violence are not pre-determined and fixed states. Instead, K. Boulding talks about “phases” (stable peace, unstable peace, unstable war, and stable war) that can change through time. To understand movements between these phases, K. Boulding focused on “strain”—elements of a system that foster phase changes—and “strength”—elements that make a system robust in the face of strain. Examples of strain include historical experiences with others, perceptions of threats, the professionalization of violent force, and the accumulation of tools of violence. Strength does not refer to military might, but rather things like human association (social and economic), habits of nonviolence and peacemaking, and formal mechanisms for peacefully navigating conflict situations.

In Cultures of Peace, Elise Boulding (2000) focuses on the diverse ways that people live together peacefully. She notes that these cultures of peace are diverse, context-specific, and constantly evolving. Like her husband, Kenneth Boulding, she embraces a process view of peace. In her telling, peace is not a static state of affairs, but rather an ongoing process of experimentation and learning how to live with others. Because of this, she introduces, and prefers, the concept “peaceableness” to the term “peace” to reflect the continuous action of peacemaking as compared to peace as being some final state that is achieved or not.

As a sociologist, E. Boulding recognizes the structural features of societies while also appreciating the role played by individuals within those structures. People are embedded in an array of institutions and organizations which influence their behavior. At the same time, people have agency (to varying degrees, depending on the context) to choose, experiment, and learn ways of peacefully living with others. One insight that emerges from E. Boulding’s analysis is that all societies have some peacemaking capabilities; even in societies marred by violence, there are certain margins where people engage peacefully with others, even if only on a localized scale. The human capacity for creativity, combined with the open-endedness of peaceableness, means that there is the possibility of new and unrecognized forms of peacemaking in the future.

One reading of the two books is to view them as (unintended) complements. K. Boulding provides a framework for thinking about how societies can move between phases of peace and violence. E. Boulding provides insight into the cultural aspects of peacemaking and, in doing so, sheds light on the micro-foundations of peace (interestingly, E. Boulding, the sociologist, offers a more micro-based treatment of peace as compared to K. Boulding, the economist, who largely focuses on interactions between states). In this regard, one can see E. Boulding’s focus on diverse cultures of peace mapping to K. Boulding’s categories of strength and strain. Cultures of violence place strain on a system while cultures of peace contribute to the strength of a system, contributing to potential resilience in the face of strain.

My goal in In Search of Monsters was to provide a counterbalance to treatments of American empire focused on the U.S. government’s role of providing public goods, both domestically and internationally (Coyne 2022). From the (dominant) public good perspective, private people fail to provide collective goods in sufficient qualities and quantities, hence the need for government provision. National and global security, and the peace offered by this security, are standard examples of public goods provided by the American government as a global hegemon. This framing equates government activities with the provision of goods, where more is preferred to less. While this is one possibility, these same activities may generate bads, where less is preferred to more. Part of my purpose was to highlight what these bads might look like in practice.

A second goal of my book was to question the tacit presupposition that “the state” is the source of peace and order. My reading of the scholarship on American empire is that it tends to neglect the role of ordinary people in producing peace. There is a connection here with the two prior books. Taking the work of K. and E. Boulding as an entry point to discuss the conditions for peace, I sought to emphasize the possibility of state actors to generate “bads” (including violence) and the capacity of non-state actors to foster peace. This does not deny the existence of collective action situations, but instead recognizes that people are capable, in certain situations, of successfully navigating these challenges in a way that does not resort to the use of violence or reliance on the coercive powers of the state. This potential is minimized in standard public goods stories, which presume that peace and security are public goods provided by states.

Given this overview of the three books and their unifying theme of exploring various aspects of peace, let’s turn to the specific contributions in this symposium. In what follows, I highlight some of the key points raised in each piece. Given the breadth of the papers, I cannot hope to give them the full justice that they deserve. Instead, I focus on a few key points in each, recognizing that their contributions go well beyond what I discuss here. The sections that follow are organized by the three books that constitute this symposium and are ordered in the year of publication of the original book.

KEYWORDS: Cultures of Peace, Stable Peace, Empirialism, Public Goods, Public Bads