The Nobel Peace Prize

​The Nobel Peace Prize has long fascinated, perplexed, even bewildered observers. Nobody has ever been as obsessed with the prize as President Trump, however. Trump’s weird fixation has forced the Nobel committee to the unusual step of publicly asserting its sole prerogative to award the prize and to insist that it is not transferable. Despite Trump's debasement and other controversies, the committee entrusted to safeguard the legacy of the Nobel Peace Prize has, on the whole, conducted itself with honor. A brief history:

​The Nobel Peace Prize was born in irony. Alfred Nobel was a wealthy industrialist with a passion for art and literature. He made a fortune perfecting a process to stabilize nitroglycerin as dynamite, making him invaluable to mining and military concerns. Nobel had been charitable in his life, but he maintained a businessman’s instincts that charity alone could not solve pressing social problems. Those needed organization and a plan. When he died in 1896, peace efforts, notably in the form of the international arbitration movement, were much in the ascendancy. Childless, Nobel left his entire fortune in a briefly scrawled will to endow five prizes in what he considered the foundational fields of human endeavor: medicine, physics, chemistry, literature, and, perhaps a bit unexpectedly, peace. Attempting to skirt fractious Scandinavian politics at the time, Nobel stipulated that the Swedes would administer the first four prizes, for which a foundation was set up. The Norwegian Storting (parliament) would administer the peace prize, which quickly moved to establish a committee that would act in parliament’s name and award the prize.
 
The committee is chosen by parliament and usually consists of prominent Norwegian scholars. In support of the committee’s work, using endowed and donated funds, in 1904 the Norwegians established the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo. The institute supports the research necessary for the committee to vet nominees. It also supports its own scholarly endeavors with lecture series, a library, and a residential fellowship program, the latter of which I was fortunate to enjoy in 2015.
 
Not well known is the fact that nominations for the prize are easy to make: any individual with tenure at a university (i.e., associate professor and above) can make a nomination. (I believe individuals of similar military or political rank can also nominate.) The committee receives many hundreds of nominations each year; vanity nominations are therefore not unusual, and the title of “Nobel Peace Prize nominee” is an honorific of virtually no worth. The institute’s researchers are responsible to discover any skeletons in a nominee’s closet, work that is usually carried out effectively.
 
Certain categories of peace work, and certain perceptions of what constitutes “peace,” have ebbed and flowed since the first prize awarded in 1901, helping to map evolving global attitudes about what “peace” means. Early laureates often tended to work in international organizations of one sort or another, or were involved in direct peace advocacy, such as the author Bertha von Suttner. Peace negotiators have been well-represented, such as Theodore Roosevelt who won in 1906 for brokering an end to the Russo-Japanese War, or Ralph Bunche, 1950’s laureate, the first African American to win the prize, for his work ending (at the time) the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The committee continues to honor the work of peace negotiators. Less favored today, though dominant in the early years, were laureates who worked in the fields of international law and arbitration. Individuals working in disarmament comprise another category, and individuals and groups pursuing anti-nuclear and anti-landmine activism continue to be honored by the committee.
 
Individuals and organizations engaged in humanitarian work have always attracted the attention of the committee, including multiple-award winners the Red Cross and various offices of the UN, whose World Food Program won in 2020. In 1922, one of the fascinating figures in Nobel Peace Prize history, Fridtjof Nansen, won for his work helping to relocate displaced victims of World War I. More recent laureates have been honored in some cases for themselves being victims of, and thus bearing witness to, terrible human rights abuses, such as Nadia Murad and Malala Yousafzai.
 
More controversial, to some, are prizes awarded for democracy promotion. Critics see such prizes as overly political, but the committee insists that authoritarianism promotes violence, while democracy tends to inculcate peace. The committee has for many years insisted that true peace must rest within democratic soil, and hence have honored democratic activists, perhaps most famously in 1964’s laureate, Martin Luther King Jr. The most recent laureate, Maria Corina Machado is in this category, as are many other recent laureates: Narges Mohammadi, Maria Ressa, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Shirin Ebadi, Rigoberta Menchu, and many others. Democracy promotion for many laureates has also meant, by definition, advocating for women’s rights and human rights, further drawing the prize into contentious and contested territory for some. The Norwegians have been criticized for alleged naivety with awards such as these, but the committee insists that bringing this work to public knowledge promotes lasting peace.
 
Further energizing the storms is the highly controversial nature of some laureates, both at the time of the award and after. Some selections were made as promissory notes for expected future peacemaking, notably Yasser Arafat’s, Yitzhak Rabin’s, and Shimon Peres’s joint prize in 1994. The selection of Henry Kissinger and Lê Đức Thọ in 1973 was also a controversial prize as the committee clearly hoped that throwing the weight of prestige behind the effort to secure peace in Vietnam would help the process along. The selection of Barack Obama in 2009, as a direct rebuke to the warmongering of the Bush years, was also a “wish as father to the thought” moment in the history of the prize. And some selections have turned out somewhat poorly in retrospect, including the Myanmar peace activist, Aung San Suu Kyi, whose later political career has drawn sharp protest from some human rights organizations, and the Ethiopian Abiy Ahmed whose peace prize in 2019 has been followed by a political career marked with human rights abuses and ethnic violence.
 
The prize brings attention to matters that many of us would otherwise remain ignorant of. The committee is aware of this and obviously tries to use the prize in this manner, which is one of the sources of criticism: that the prize doesn’t honor honest peace work but rather the temporary political fixations of overly-idealistic Norwegians. But much democratic, activist, and justice-seeking work would otherwise be ignored, including especially the work of women who often toil in obscurity. Readers will have to judge for themselves whether such work is important and accrues to the cause of peace. My own mind is firm on this point.
 
The Nobel Peace Center in Oslo is a museum of the prize and its laureates and is well worth a visit. Malala’s blood-soaked school uniform is one of the first displays one encounters, a moving and poignant tribute to the stakes of peace.

Further reading: The ultimate insider’s account by the long-time director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute, Geir Lundestad, The World’s Most Prestigious Prize: The Inside Story of the Nobel Peace Prize (Oxford 2019).

For a more critical view, Jay Nordlinger, Peace, They Say: A History of the Nobel Peace Prize, The Most Famous and Controversial Prize in the World (Encounter , 2012).
 
—David J. Snyder