18 January 1910—18 March 1993
Economist of Peace
Born in England, the son of a Liverpool plumber, Kenneth Boulding was the first in his family to go beyond elementary school. In his early years, the memory of the horrors of World War I made him a pacifist and led him to reject his family’s Methodism (British Methodists had endorsed the war) and to join the Society of Friends. Boulding’s commitment to nonviolence exerted a profound influence on his life’s work.
Boulding was a brilliant student, earning an Oxford scholarship and later a fellowship at the University of Chicago. After settling in the United States, he began his scholarly life as an economist. But his interests ranged far beyond the boundaries of his specific discipline to include philosophy, religion, poetry, and systems analysis. He was convinced that “in any applied field one had to use all the social sciences . . . as all the social sciences were essentially studying the same thing, which was the social system.”
In 1937, Boulding joined the faculty of Colgate University where he stayed for thirty years before moving to the University of Colorado. Collaborating with his wife, Elise Boulding, whom he married in 1941 and with whom he raised five children, Boulding’s theories on peace and conflict resolution, explored in over thirty books, mirrored his pacifism. His Quaker background especially drew him to explore self-interested modes of exchange, the relationship between warfare and fear, and the importance of social and cultural interdependence to individual flourishing. In his 1963 book Conflict and Defense, he argued that understanding the dynamics of conflict is essential in the struggle for peace. Contrary to the opinions of many of his fellow economists, Boulding denied that economic growth was effectively fueled by warfare. Instead, he argued, it rested on cooperation and collaboration.
Boulding was more than a scholar of peace; he was also a peace activist. In 1942 he authored a circular that denounced World War II. Twenty-three years later, he helped organize the first teach-in against the Vietnam War. Boulding was also one of the first economists to decry what he called the “cowboy” mentality of wasteful and nonsustainable consumption, and he coined the term “spaceship earth” (later made famous by Buckminster Fuller) to draw attention to the need for more ecologically minded lifestyles and public policies.
Boulding died in Colorado in his eighty-fourth year. In a tribute to him, futurist and economist Hazel Henderson called Boulding “a towering intellectual figure of the twentieth century who did more than most to open windows to the twenty-first century.”
19 January
Helen Mack Chang
19 January 1952—
Rationality in Justice
Before the death of her sister, Helen Mack Chang described her life as conventional and comfortable. An ethnic Chinese whose family lived in Guatemala, Chang was in her late thirties when her younger sister Myrna was stabbed twenty-seven times by a young sergeant from the Estado Mayor Presidencial, the much-feared presidential guard.
Myrna’s murder was an effort on the part of Guatemala’s oppressive junta to stop her investigations into the deaths and displacements of thousands of indigenous Mayans. Killed or driven from their mountain homes over the course of Guatemala’s thirty-five-year civil war, the Mayans were forced into squalid refugee camps. The Guatemalan government refused to acknowledge or take responsibility for their plight. Myrna, an anthropologist, traveled to a number of camps to document personal accounts of persecution and genocide. She had already published some of the material and planned to release more. That’s why she was murdered.
Myrna’s death, Chang said, changed her life forever. Correctly believing that the murder was politically motivated, she began a one-woman crusade to prove her suspicion and to break the culture of impunity for political crimes that Guatemala’s various military regimes had fostered. After nearly a decade, hearings before no fewer than twelve different judges, and the assassination of the lead police investigator, the military commando who murdered Chang’s sister was finally convicted. During that period, Chang’s bulldog persistence in following the chain of evidence also led to the indictment of three high-ranking military officers who ordered the slaying.
During the course of her search for her sister’s murderer, Chang received many death threats and was even occasionally accused by other anti-government activists of being motivated by a desire for revenge. But Chang insisted that she sought justice rather than reprisal. “This is a fight for rationality in justice and for the common happiness that is the fruit of justice,” she said. Her sister’s murder was the catalyst for calling into question the arbitrariness of a justice system that prosecuted some crimes but ignored those committed in the interests of the repressive government. In essence, she said, pursuit of the governmental forces that murdered her sister was “putting on trial the existing policy of terror in Guatemala during the last thirty years.”
Chang’s efforts were honored with the 1993 Right Livelihood Award, a recognition often referred to as the alternative Nobel Peace Prize. Shortly afterwards she founded the Myrna Mack Foundation, a human rights advocacy organization, to continue her struggle for “rational”—nonarbitrary—justice in Guatemala.
20 January
Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan
1890—20 January 1988
Servant of God
In 1921, thirty-one-year-old Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan was behind bars for defying British colonial law. His crime was working for educational reform in remote villages of present-day Pakistan. When the magistrate questioning him expressed doubt about Khan’s professed loyalty to nonviolence, Khan replied that he was a follower of Mohandas Gandhi. “And what if you’d never heard of Gandhi?” he was asked. The tall, muscular Khan startled the magistrate by effortlessly pulling the iron bars apart. He was sentenced to three years.
Khan was born into a wealthy and devout Muslim family in the Pathan village of Utmanzai. Despite the Pathan tradition of blood feuds and honor killings, which made the tribe one of the most violent in British India’s Northwest Frontier, Khan’s father struggled to live peacefully and to instill an aversion to violence in his son. He raised Khan to see Islam as a religion that advocated harmony and reconciliation.
The roots of Khan’s nonviolence thus lay explicitly in his religious faith. He was convinced not only that the basic message of Islam is peace, but that this message of peace was the key to reconciliation with all other faiths as well. As an adult, Khan’s openness to other religious perspectives made him a close friend and collaborator of Gandhi. Together the two worked to reconcile Hindus and Muslims in their common quest for independence from the British Raj.
One of the most dramatic expressions of Khan’s devotion to nonviolence was his 1924 founding of the Khudai Khidmatgars, or “Servants of God,” a nonviolent army of Pathans whose members took an oath to serve “humanity in the name of God, to refrain from violence and revenge, and to forgive those who oppressed them or treated them with cruelty.” The Servants of God, who eventually numbered approximately one hundred thousand, boasted all the trappings of a regular army. They wore uniforms, formed regiments, and trained and drilled. But their training was in nonviolent resistance and their weapons were patience and righteousness, which, according to Khan, “no power on earth can stand against.” The Servants of God were at hundreds of strikes and public demonstrations against the British rulers of India to protect participants from British soldiers. British repression of them was particularly severe, in part because of the Pathans’ legendary ferocity as warriors. In 1930, after one of Khan’s periodic arrests by the authorities, the British killed three hundred of them as they conducted a nonviolent protest. Their resilient dedication to nonviolence and their courage amazed even Gandhi.
After India’s independence in 1947 and subsequent separation from Pakistan, Khan worked with the new country to encourage the growth of democratic institutions. But he proved a thorn in the side of Pakistani leaders who wished to make the nation a military power. Repeatedly arrested and imprisoned—he once sadly noted that he had been treated more humanely in British prisons than