pdf of program
Peace History Society Biennial Conference
“Peace Across the Ages: Legacies, Lessons, and Change”
November 6-8, 2025 | Berry College | Mount Berry, GA
Thursday, November 6
4:30 PM - PHS Board Meeting (Location TBD)
6:00 PM - Board Dinner (Location TBD)
6:30-8:30 PM - Registration Table Open (Ford Living Room)
7:00-8:30 PM - Opening Reception (Ford Living Room)
Shuttle from Berry to Fairfield at 6:45, 7:15, 8:20, and 8:40 PM
Friday, November 7
Shuttle from Fairfield Inn to Berry College at 8:00, 8:20, and 8:40 AM
8:00 AM-5:00 PM - Registration (Krannert Center Back Lobby)
8:00-12:00 PM - Coffee (Krannert Ballroom)
Session I: 9:00-10:30 AM
Panel 1: Legacies and Lessons of Intergenerational Peacebuilding in Africa
Krannert 217
Chair and Commenter: Gail Presbey, University of Detroit Mercy
Legacy of the Nigerian Civil War: Historical Lessons for Contemporary Peacebuilding
Oge Samuel Okonkwo, The University of Ghana
The Forgotten Peacekeepers: African Veterans of Nonviolence UN Missions and the Intergenerational Transmission of Peace Ethics
Issac Abiodun Adelekun, University of Delaware
Archival Fragments: The War Resisters' International and African pacifists in the 1950s
Henrike Vellinga, Leiden University
Panel 2: Dodgers and GIs: Antiwar Activism during the Vietnam War
Krannert 324
Chair and Commenter: Marc Becker,Truman State University
An Antiwar Activist’s Stanford Awakening: Mitchell Goodman’s Intellectual Journey, 1967-1972
Matthew Loayza, Minnesota State University, Mankato
Waging Peace: Dissent, Democracy, and the Vietnam Antiwar Movement
Mitchell K. Hall, Central Michigan University
What Now? The GI Movement and Military Counseling in the Wake of the Vietnam War
Amy Rutenberg, Iowa State University
Session II: 10:45 AM-12:15 PM
Panel 3: Peace in the Face of Atomic Annihilation
Krannert 324
Chair and Commenter: Henry Maar, CSU-Northridge
The Last Peace: Collier’s and Liberal Dreams of Atomic Triumph, 1951
Mike Davis, Lees-McRae College
The Application of the Theory of Groupthink to the Cuban Missile Crisis
Lubna Qureshi, Independent Historian
Panel 4: Pacifism and Politics in Latin American Women’s Movements
Krannert 217
Chair and Commenter: Roger Peace, Independent Scholar
Twentieth Century Latin American Women’s Movements
Marc Becker, Truman State University
The 1947 Inter-American Congress of Women and Guatemalan Women’s Movements
Patricia Harms, Brandon University
12:30 PM - Lunch and Awards Presentations
Krannert Ballroom
Award Winners
Scott Bills Memorial Prize in Peace History
Winner: Donald W. Maxwell, Unguarded Border: American Emigres in Canada during the Vietnam War (Rutgers University Press, 2023).
Donald W. Maxwell's Unguarded Border: American Emigres in Canada during the Vietnam War explores the difficult choice of young men facing the draft during the Vietnam War to find refuge in Canada. Maxwell provides a fresh, transnational perspective by exploring the issue from both sides of the border. A social history of who emigrated and why, Maxwell raises important questions about citizenship and national identity in a period of social and political turmoil. He shows the challenges and successes of young Americans who rejected militarism and compulsory military service, some of whom made permanent new lives in Canada, and others who faced loneliness and returned to the United States even before amnesty programs became available. These stories are integrated with those of Canadians who opposed the war and generally welcomed the Americans, with support groups forming in many cities and the Canadian government providing legal residency. This book adds new and essential details to the history of the anti-war movement and conscientious objection of the 1960s and 1970s. Maxwell also ably demonstrates how the Canadian government, by disregarding the draft status of American men entering the country, represented public opinion in opposing the war in Vietnam without antagonizing the United States. Maxwell's study is a welcome addition to the field of peace history.
Prize Committee: Michaelle Tusan (Chair), Roger Peace, Wendy Chmielewski
Elise M. Boulding Prize in Peace History
Winner: Marc-William Palen, Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World (Princeton, 2024).
Honorable Mention: Michelle M. Nickerson, Spiritual Criminals: How the Camden 28 Put the Vietnam War on Trial (University of Chicago Press, 2024).
Palen’s powerful book explores the role of free trade ideology in shaping pacifist thought and practice prior to the Cold War. This intellectual and economic history excavates the central role that free trade played in visions of a world without imperialism and war. A loose coalition of liberals, feminists, pacifists, and socialists argued for the end of a nationalist imperial order through a form of economic cosmopolitanism that transcended borders. This discourse has been largely overlooked by historians who focus on the cold war era and offers a new and timely perspective in Peace Studies.
Nickerson offers a powerful history of the Camden 28 trials and the wider Catholic resistance movement during the Vietnam era. Deeply researched and thoughtfully written she places the Catholic Left at the center of Peace movement histories beyond the more familiar narratives of the Berrigan Brothers and Dorothy Day. Nickerson also delves into the personalist religious beliefs of movement activists and is attentive to divisions within the movement, particularly along lines of gender.
Prize Committee: Victoria Wolcott (Chair), Tracy K’Meyer, Deborah Buffton
Peace History Society Edited Book Prize
Winner: Charles F. Howlett, Christin P. Peterson, Deborah D. Buffton, & David L. Hostetter, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Peace History (Oxford University Press, 2023).
Prize Committee: Scott Bennett (Chair), Brian Mueller, Leilah Danielson
DeBenedetti Prize in Peace History
Winner: Sara L. Kimble, "The Genocide Convention is 'Our Cause': International Women’s Advocacy for the Criminalization of Genocide, 1945-1952," Holocaust and Genocide Studies 38, no. 3 (2024): 323-339.
Honorable mention: Elizabeth Son, “‘Stitching Korea Back Together’: Jogakbo Aesthetics of Care in Peace Advocacy,” Theatre Journal 76, no. 4 (2024): 525-548.
Sara Kimble's article "The Genocide Convention is 'Our Cause': International Women’s Advocacy for the Criminalization of Genocide, 1945-1952," brings to light the often overlooked role women's organizations played in the establishment of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Refusing to remain victims or be victimized by the circumstance of their gender, Kimble's thoroughly researched discussion outlines how women's wartime activism and their intimate knowledge of Nazi atrocities, specifically those related to women, shaped their discussions, views, and critiques of the Convention and its failure to address sexual violence and the political repression of vulnerable groups globally. Through her gendered approach, Kimble is able to fill-in the silences and blank spaces within genocide scholarship to delve into how women's idealism contrasted with the seemingly pragmatic approach of male lawyers and politicians in the immediate postwar era. Despite their optimism and faith in the "moralizing power of law" these groups, Kimble nuances, were unable to overcome the fraught political tensions of the Cold War era to remain united in their cause. Her article provides the foundation for further research into the complex, hidden histories of women's work in the creation, propagation, and adherence to the UN's Genocide Conventions and their protection of inalienable human rights.
Prize Committee: Lauren Jannette (Chair), Harvey Strum, Sakiko Kaiga, Ronald Musto
PHS Lifetime Achievement Award
Winner: Melvin Small
The Peace History Society established its Lifetime Achievement Award to recognize those members who have contributed outstanding scholarship and exemplary service to the PHS and to the field of peace history. Dr. Small’s involvement with the Peace History Society began with its origins as the Council for Peace Research in History (CPRH) in 1964 and spans decades, culminating in a term as CPRH president from 1990-1992; he also served on the CPRH Council and on the Board of Editors for Peace & Change.
Earning his degrees at Dartmouth and the University of Michigan, Dr. Small established his professional home at Wayne State, where he taught from 1965 until his retirement in 2010. A truly international scholar, his career has included Visiting Professorships in Denmark and Canada as well as lectures in Italy, Norway, and Sweden
His own antiwar activism during the Vietnam era helped inform his professional life. He has a lengthy and impressive record of scholarship that has had a huge impact in shaping our understanding of antiwar activism and its effect on American politics and society during the Vietnam War era. These works include: Johnson, Nixon, and the Doves (1988); Antiwarriors: The Vietnam War and the Struggle for America’s Hearts and Minds (2002); Covering Dissent: The Media and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement (1994); and At the Water’s Edge: American Politics and the Vietnam War (2005). He also co-edited Give Peace a Chance: Exploring the Vietnam Antiwar Movement (1992), based on papers presented at the Charles DeBenedetti Memorial Conference, co-sponsored by the CPRH at the University of Toledo in 1990, which he helped organize as program chair. Other notable works include The Presidency of Richard Nixon (1999), Democracy and Diplomacy: The Impact of Domestic Politics on U.S. Foreign Policy, 1789-1994 (1996), and The Wages of War:1816-1965 (1972). Over a nearly fifty-year span, he produced an extensive list of articles that have appeared in journals such as Peace and Change, Diplomatic History, the Journal of Peace Research, and the Journal of Conflict Resolution, while several valuable essays appear in notable edited collections.
Dr. Small served the historical profession through frequent appearances as a session chair, commentator, or panelist at a wide range of conferences. He was very active as a book reviewer, as a manuscript referee for some of the leading journals and book publishers in our field and was a frequent interview subject by television and print media. He mentored nearly forty graduate students at Wayne State University and as a colleague generously served as a sounding board for peace scholars at all stages of their careers.
The current vitality of the Peace History Society was made possible by the contributions of pioneers such as Mel Small, and so it is with gratitude that we extend our appreciation by recognizing him with the 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award.
Prize Committee: Michael Clinton (Chair), Mitchell Hall, Robbie Lieberman
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Mary Dudziak, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law, Emory University
“War and Peace in Time and Space”
A leading scholar in US legal history, Mary L. Dudziak’s scholarship has ranged across topics such as the concept of “wartime,” the impact of race and civil rights on American foreign policy during the Cold War, and other topics in twentieth century history. Dudziak has been a faculty member of Emory Law School since 2012, was previously the Judge Edward J. and Ruey L. Guirado Professor of Law, History and Political Science at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. She has also taught at the University of Iowa, Duke Law School, Harvard Law School, and the University of Maryland School of Law.
A member of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), Dudziak served as President in 2017 and Vice President in 2016. She was named an Honorary Fellow of the American Society for Legal History (ASLH) in 2017 and served as the Kluge Chair in American Law and Governance at the Library of Congress in fall 2015. She also served for eight years as a member of the Department of State’s Historical Advisory Committee, ending her term in 2021. She has had fellowships with the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, the Center for Advanced Study at Princeton, and others. She also previously served as a board member for SHAFR, the ASLH, the Law and Society Association, and on boards of the journals American Quarterly and Diplomatic History.
Currently, she is a Nonresidential Fellow of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and a Life Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Her present courses at Emory Law include Constitutional Law, Equality at Emory, Foreign Relations Law, Going to War, and War and Security Colloquium.
Her most recent book, Making the Forever War: Marilyn B. Young on the Culture and Politics of American Militarism (2021), co-edited with Mark Phillip Bradkey, was published by the University of Massachusetts Press. Her first book, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy, Princeton University Press, was republished this year in a 25th anniversary edition. Her upcoming book, Going to War: An American History, will be published by Oxford University Press.
Session III: 2:00 PM-3:15 PM
Plenary Session - “War and Peace in Time and Space”
McAllister Auditorium
Keynote Speaker - Dr. Mary L. Dudziak, Asas Griggs Candler Professor of Law, Emory University
Session IV: 3:30-5:00 PM
Panel 5: The U.S. Peace Movement in the Age of Deindustrialization Krannert 324
Chair and Commenter: Amy Rutenberg, Iowa State University
Civilian NASA: Organized Labor’s Role in the U.S. Peace Movement, 1970-1990
Sean Raming, University of Notre Dame
“A Desire for Peace Should Not Mean Unemployment”: The Trident Campaign, Peace Conversion, and the Limits of Peace Work in Southeastern Connecticut
Toshihiro Higuchi, Georgetown University
Ron Dellums, the Peace Dividend, and Base Closures in post-Cold War Oakland
David Fitzgerald, University College Cork
Chair and Commenter: Matthew Stanard, Berry College
South African Women’s Protests against Pass Laws and Internal Borders: Their Relevance for Women at International Borders Today
Gail Presbey, University of Detroit Mercy
Peace Bodies: Women, Encampments, and the Struggle against Nuclear Weapons during the Cold War, 1979-1992
Janette Aileen Clay, North Park University
Dinner on your own (Berry Dining Hall is open in Krannert Basement)
Shuttle from Berry to Fairfield at 5:20, 5:40, and 6:00 PM
8:00 AM-5:00 PM - Registration (Green Hall Lobby)
8:00-12:00 PM - Coffee (Green Hall Lobby)
Shuttle from Fairfield Inn to Berry College at 8:00, 8:20, and 8:40 AM
Session V: 9:00-10:30 AM
Panel 7: Uncovering Unconventional Peace Narratives Green 326
Chair and Commenter: Kelsey Rice, Berry College
Unquiet Archives: Public Memory and the Aporetic Sensorium in NFBC Digital Storytelling
John Bessai, Independent Scholar
Boredom and Brutality: Unveiling the Untold Realities of the War in Afghanistan
Dominic J. Markham, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs
Politics of Peace Narratives
Vanja Petri?evi?, Florida Gulf Coast University
Panel 8: Exemplary Women in the Fight for Peace Green 306
Chair and Commenter: Carolien Stolte, Leiden University
Kathleen Lonsdale: Living a Life of Integrity in Challenging Times
Deborah Buffton, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse
A Buffer and a Bridge: Mary Emma Wooley at the 1932 Geneva Disarmament Conference
Christy Jo Snider, Berry College
Peace in the Shadow of [Dis]order: Overlapping the Intellectual Life of Adetowun
Olatunde Taiwo, University of Ghana and Olabisi Onabanjo University, Nigeria
Session VI: 10:45 AM-12:15 PM
Panel 9: International Coalitions for Peace in the Era of Decolonization Green 326
Chair and Commenter: Michael Clinton, Gwynedd Mercy University
Towards a (More) Global History of International Peace Advocacy
Carolien Stolte, Leiden University
Nature’s Violence: The Intellectual Origins of Nonviolence in Evolutionist and Ecological Ashrams
Floris de Ruiter, Leiden University
Forgotten Paths to Independence: Peace, Pacifism, and the Decolonization of the Maghreb
Daniele Paolini, Leiden University
Panel 10: Transnational Anti-Nuclearism at the End of the Cold War Green 306
Chair and Commenter: Toshi Higuchi, Georgetown University
Peace Heroes: Peace Activists Confront the Arms Race, 1977-1987
Henry Maar, California State University, Northridge
The International Campaign to Promote Conscientious Objection Rights in the Soviet Bloc, 1985-1991
Christian P. Peterson, Ferris State University
The Nevada-Semipalatinsk Anti-Nuclear Movement: Embedding the USSR in Networks of Global (Anti)-Colonialism
Kamila Smagulova, Leiden University
12:30 PM - Lunch and PHS Business Meeting
Krannert Ballroom
Panel 11: The Diplomacy of Peace
Green 326
Chair and Commenter: Laurence Marvin, Berry College
Helping to Negotiate a New Law of the Sea Treaty in the 1970s: Lessons for Today’s Peace and Environmental Activists
Ralph Levering, Davidson College
Shifting Affinities: Mapping the Relationship between Weapons Prohibitions and Pacifism, 1860s-1920s
Elena Kempf, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Panel 12: New Approaches to Peace Education Green 306
Chair and Commenter: Deborah Buffton, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse
Against the Grain: Museums for Peace and Peace Building in Challenging Times
Joyce Apsel, New York University
Deconstructing Curriculums of Peace: Pathways Towards Countering the Epistemic Violence of Pacifying Pedagogies
Courtney Langerud and Casey Tokita, Arizona State University
TED Talk Peace: An Analysis
Stephen W. Minnema, Independent Scholar
Farewell Remarks: 3:45-4:15 PM
Green 306
Shuttle from Berry to Fairfield at 4:30 and 4:50 PM
Dinner on your own
