Peace History Society

Scott Bills Memorial Prize
First Book / Dissertation in Peace History Published in 2020-2022
Awarded October 2023

The Peace History Society awards the Scott Bills Memorial Prize bi-annually for an outstanding English-language work in the field of Peace History.

The winner for 2020-2022 is Sakiko Kaiga, Britain and the Intellectual Origins of the League of Nations (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Britain and the Intellectual Origins of the League of Nations focuses on the influence of the Bryce Group in Britain (named for its leader, Viscount James Bryce, a former ambassador to the US) on the formation, in 1915, of Britain’s League of Nations Society, which in turn helped develop the post-World War I League of Nations itself. Kaiga’s analysis shows the Bryce Group and the League of Nations Society to be products of both the peace movement and the just-war traditions, emphasizing that their idealistic and realistic strands cannot be disentangled. Despite the Bryce Group’s original vision that a League of Nations should be an inclusive and non-vindictive organization, Kaiga demonstrates that as its ideas became part of public discourse in Britain and the US towards the end of World War I, they were transformed, so that the League that eventually formed in 1919-1920 represented, instead, a “victors’ peace.”

Sakiko Kaiga, winner of the Scott Bills Memorial Prize, with Robert Shaffer, Chair of the Scott Bills Memorial Prize committee and Gail Presbey, PHS President.