Matriarch of Peace Research and Early NP Supporter Remembered

Elise Boulding was a giant of a peacemaker and made a powerful contribution to peacemaking, peacekeeping and peace-building and peace studies programs around the world. Elise also had a great influence on the beginning of Peaceworkers and Nonviolent Peaceforce. In the summer of 1993, I wrote an article about the need for nonviolent peace teams on a much larger scale to a number of friends. Elise Boulding then forwarded my letter to about 200 key peacemakers around the world who were friends of hers. Elise edited a newsletter sharing the responses to my article from many of those two hundred people and the discussion/newsletter continued for several years - with the ongoing correspondence from the peace scholars and peaceworkers around the world. This helped lay the foundation for what later became Nonviolent Peaceforce.

 Several years later Nonviolence International facilitated a conference in Washington DC of people working with peace teams from around the world. Elise led a session in which we each envisioned where the peace team movement could be 10 years hence. That was a very powerful experience for me in which I envisioned and then wrote down a vision of where the peace team movement could be ten years hence.  This vision  empowered me to work even harder in the succeeding years to help this vision become reality. - another building block for NP.

Several years after that when Mel Duncan and I met with Elise about progress in developing the Peaceforce, Elise said, when you get NP up and running with teams on the ground, I will contribute $1,000.  This was one of our largest contributions at that time. How encouraging!  - another building block!

Thank you Elise for your life and your very important contribution to building the Nonviolent Peaceforce. Warm Greetings to all and thanks for all your hard and courageous work with NP.

Peace, David Hartsough - Co-Founder of Nonviolent Peaceforce and Executive Director, PEACEWORKERS

New YorkTimes obituary of Elise Boulding - http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/02/us/02boulding.html?_r=2

Personal remembrance of Elise Boulding - click here.