In Their Own Words

Humour

“We are all suffering from ‘hurry-sickness’, trying to fix the world by next Tuesday.”

She found it humorous (and tragic) that humans think they are at the center of time. She would say that today isn’t just right now; it is a 200-year span reaching back to the birth of the oldest person you knew as a child, and forward to the 100th birthday of the youngest baby born today. She used this to gently mock the short-termism of politicians, laughing at the idea that anyone could solve a systemic problem in a single four-year term. Elise’s humour was gentle, ironic, and perspective shifting. In her later years, she often joked about the “business” of peace. She found a quiet irony in the fact that peace activists often became so busy attending international conferences and managing systems that they could be viewed as “stressed-out peace-mongers”.

 

Professional Activities

Elise was a towering figure in sociology, and the primary architect of modern peace research. Her professional life was defined by the integration of systems theory, feminism, and global activism. After earning her PhD at age 46, she chaired the Sociology Department at Dartmouth College, where she transitioned the field from a focus on state-run institutions to the study of Global Civic Culture which she saw as a vast network of non-governmental organizations and grassroots systems that function across borders.

She co-founded the International Peace Research Association (IPRA) and played a critical role at the United Nations, serving on the board of the United Nations University and advising UNESCO. Elise was famous for her Imaging the Future workshops during which she used a planning method called backcasting that starts with a specific, successful future outcome and works backward to identify the steps required to connect that future to the present. In short, forecasting is a map of where you are going while backcasting is a map of how to get home from a place you’ve already visited in your imagination.

She wrote over twenty books, including the landmark The Underside of History, which drew attention to the invisible actors of social systems: women, children, and the elderly. Through her leadership in the Quaker movement and her nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 she bridged the gap between rigorous academic sociology and transformative global peacebuilding.

 

Contributions To Canada’s Systems Thinking Literacy

• Mentorship of Canadian scholars: She was a foundational mentor to leaders at the Canadian Peace Research Institute (CPRI), helping integrate social systems theory into Canadian peace studies.
• NGO systemic literacy: Through her work with the International Peace Research Association, she trained Canadian activists to view their work not as isolated charity, but as part of a Global Civic Culture enhancing the strategic sophistication of Canadian NGOs.
• Imaging the Future workshops: Her Imaging the Future workshops were widely adopted in Canadian educational and Quaker circles, providing a practical method for backcasting that moved Canadian planners beyond reactionary policy-making.
• Humanize Canadian sociology: She influenced the Canadian sociological tradition to include invisible systems such as domestic labor and grassroots networks bridging the gap between rigid academic systems and community-level action.
• The 200-Year Present: This concept became a tool for Canadian environmentalists and social planners to conceptualize long-term systemic change across generations.

 

Contributions To Canadian K-12 Education 

Elise helped shift Canadian schooling toward nurturing socially responsible, active, and empathetic citizens.

• Peace and Conflict Resolution: Normalized nonviolence, peer mediation, and restorative justice frameworks in classroom management and anti-bullying policies.
•  Global citizenship curricula: Broadened social studies and civics programs by emphasizing human rights, cross-cultural empathy, and global interdependence.
• Futures pedagogy: Pioneered forward looking learning models that encourage students to actively envision and design sustainable, peaceful futures rather than studying past conflicts passively.
• Social-Emotional Learning: Advanced a wholistic model of education that integrates emotional literacy, gender equality, and community building alongside traditional academics.
• Frameworks for educators: Provided theoretical research that inspired Canadian teachers’ unions, NGOs, and curriculum designers to develop dedicated peace education learning resources.

 

Contributions To The Global Systems Thinking Discipline

Elise revolutionized global systems thinking by humanizing a discipline previously dominated by mechanical and state-centric models. Her primary contribution was shifting the “unit of analysis” from the nation-state to Global Civic Culture, a vast interconnected web of NGO’s and grassroots networks that function as the world’s actual stabilizing force. By mapping these non-state actors she demonstrated that global stability relies more on shared human interests than on military borders.

In her seminal work The Underside of History Boulding introduced a critical systemic variable: the invisible labor of women, children, and the marginalized. She argued that these domestic and communal spheres form the subsistence system upon which all political and economic structures depend. Furthermore, she integrated the household as the primary cell of the global organism, linking kitchen-table dynamics directly to international peace. Perhaps most importantly, she introduced intentionality into systems theory through her Imaging work. She posited that a society’s collective image of the future is a causal force that shifts a system’s internal vision from war to peace, hence the trajectory of the entire system changes. Ultimately, Boulding reimagined the world not as a machine of gears and levers, but as a living, evolutionary organism sustained by relationships and shared knowledge.

 

Individual Learning & Projects

 

Apart from the first appearance of the word Cybernetics in a book title in the late 1940’s, it wasn’t until the late 1960’s that publicly available books included the term Systems Thinking or Systems Science in the title. For the first wave of pioneers, beyond thought engagements with the authors in their Personal Learning Sources, Learner Activities were predominantly via living engagements with other people, in organised academia or independent scholars. This included 1) people studying General Systems Theory, 2) people working in the pioneer’s primary discipline, 3) people from other disciplines building interdisciplinary systems thinking skills, and 4) people wanting to stay in tune with the growing Systems Thinking community taking shape.

This text uses the word engagement to mean “active involvement and interest”. The term living engagements here includes spoken conversations with another person or group of people and written conversations in academic or professional organisation publications. The living engagement may have been supportive or disputational in nature.

The Projects of these pioneers could include teaching undergraduate university students, teaching and conducting research with graduate/post-graduate university students, or conducting research in learning institutes/foundations. Projects for some of them involved constructing an information sharing network enabling the interdisciplinary communication to occur, or working in diverse business, government and non-government organisations outside academia. Some pioneers chose to work as much as possible outside organised academia and conducted socioculturally impacting projects as independent scholars.

Anchoring themselves in stable spousal relationships and home life enabled each pioneer to sustain day-to-day wellbeing as they evolved their systems thinking skills over many decades. As lifelong learners they remained exceptionally productive and fulfilled in and outside the formal academic setting for much of their lives.

The learner activities and projects listed below are intended as starting points for deeper dives into the full network of people with whom they engaged and the projects they conducted.

 

Learner Activities 

With whom did Elise engage more frequently in the Systems Thinking community?

Kenneth Boulding, Ervin Laszlo, C. West Churchman, Robert L. Kahn, Daniel Katz

 With whom did Elise engage more frequently in her discipline? 

Johan Galtung, Robert C. Angell, Louis Kriesberg, Fred Polak, Jessie Bernard

 With whom did Elise engage more frequently from other disciplines? 

Kenneth Boulding, Eleanora Masini, Daisaku Ikeda, Paul Joseph, Shirley Nuss

 What role did Elise’s spouse play in her engagements?

Kenneth Boulding played a multifaceted, foundational role in Elise Boulding’s scholarly, institutional, and activist engagements. Through Kenneth’s established leadership in economics and the Society for General Systems Research, Elise was brought into direct, sustained dialogue with natural scientists, evolutionary theorists, and economists. Their home and academic offices (The “Boulding Network”) functioned as international salons where scholars, activists, and international diplomats met to discuss global governance, disarmament, and futures studies. As active members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), their shared commitment to nonviolence, social justice, and internationalism formed the practical and ethical backbone of their joint public advocacy, civil rights work, and anti-war campaigning.

 

Projects

The Image of the Future (translated from Dutch and condensed,1961)

International Peace Research Newsletter (founding editor, contributor, 1968)

The Underside of History: A View of Women through Time (1976)

United States Academy of Peace (established, 1981)

Cultures of Peace: The Hidden Side of History (2000)

 

 

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