There are few honours in the world quite as prestigious, and yet quite as perplexing, as the Nobel Peace Prize. The Norwegian Nobel Committee has a long, theatrical history of praising the unexpectedly deserving and the disturbingly convenient, leaving some heroes unadorned and some hard-headed killers festooned with medals.
The prize, after all, was founded by Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite. The man who created one of history’s most efficient tools for mass destruction decided, in a late-life burst of cosmic irony, that he wanted to be remembered for funding peace. This original, beautiful contradiction is likely the reason the award continues to generate such paroxysms of paradox.
Let’s begin with the obvious, the man who is to non-violence what the dictionary is to words: Mahatma Gandhi. The architect of India’s freedom, who showed the world that peaceful resistance could humble an empire, was nominated five times (1937, 1938, 1939, 1947, and a posthumous consideration in 1948). Yet, the Mahatma went empty-handed every single time. The committee’s decision to reserve the 1948 prize altogether, citing “no suitable living candidate”, just weeks after Gandhi’s assassination, has been called one of the greatest omissions in the award’s history. It’s an oversight so glaring it is more than a historical quirk; it is a reminder that the committee’s spotlight has sometimes been more Eurocentric and cautious than inspirational.
If you can be a man who preached non-violence for a lifetime and still not win, what does it take to earn a Nobel Peace Prize? Well, sometimes, it just takes dropping a whole lot of bombs.
U.S. President Donald Trump | Reuters
Enter Henry Kissinger, the former US secretary of state, who was awarded the prize in 1973 for negotiating the Paris Peace Accords to end the Vietnam War. This is the same Kissinger who was the key architect behind the secret bombing of Cambodia and Laos, an escalation that destabilised the region and is estimated to have contributed to the rise of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime. The prize, shared with North Vietnam’s Lê Ðức Thọ (who, in a spectacular show of integrity, refused to accept it), caused such an uproar that two members of the Nobel Committee actually resigned in protest. Satirist Tom Lehrer famously quipped that the award had made “political satire obsolete”.
Another eyebrow-raiser was the prize given to Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed in 2019 for his “decisive initiative to resolve the border conflict with neighbouring Eritrea”. A great achievement, undoubtedly. However, just one year later, Abiy launched a major military offensive into the northern Tigray region, starting a devastating civil war that descended into widespread atrocities and a humanitarian crisis. The quick, stunning reversal from prophet of peace to major aggressor is a stark reminder that the prize often rewards an actor of aspiration rather than a titan of tranquillity.
The laureate list reads like a syllabus of ironies. Theodore Roosevelt won for brokering a peace, yet he was also a rough-and-tumble imperialist; Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin won for Camp David, while the unresolved conflicts assailing millions of Palestinians continued elsewhere. Barack Obama won early and then watched the messy work of statecraft complicate the tidy rhetoric of the citation.
This brings us to the elephant in the room—the one who simply can’t stop tweeting about his own Nobel-worthiness—President Donald Trump. The Nobel Peace Prize, at its most baffling, seems to prefer a dramatic narrative arc. It loves a warmonger who briefly flirts with peace (Kissinger), or a peacemaker who hasn’t quite earned the committee’s stamp of approval (Gandhi).
So, take heart, Donald. If you, a world-famous figure, have not won the Nobel Peace Prize, you are in the great, glorious, and deeply moral company of Gandhi. If you have won it, you might be a genuine peace-maker who knows how to lean hard on Pakistani generals, or you might be a man whose greatest legacy involves a controversial bombing campaign.
The lesson? The only thing the Nobel Peace Prize truly guarantees is a nice ceremony in Oslo. It cannot confer moral authority, nor can it deny it. So, maybe you shouldn’t feel so bad after all. Maybe not winning is simply the universe’s polite way of sparing you from future, awkward footnotes.
editor@theweek.in