The political wars of the Nobel Peace Prize

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, winner of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize, said of his award: ‘One day no one was listening. The next, I was an oracle.’

It is an award like no other – the ultimate accolade which inspiring individuals, such as Martin Luther King Jr, Leymah Gbowee and Malala Yousafzai, have won for their courageous pursuit of peace. The prize has also been bestowed on bodies such as the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and the World Food Programme, shining light on causes that need more global attention. This year’s winner is the Iranian human rights activist Narges Mohammadi.

However, the Nobel Prize Committee, which consists of five individuals appointed by the Norwegian parliament, usually retired politicians who claim total independence in their decision-making, has not always got it right. It has been castigated for awarding prizes to those who have not achieved enough or who turn out to be undeserving. Critics say this damages the reputation of the award.

The controversial winners include politicians untested by power or those attempting to solve intractable ethnic conflicts. Aung San Suu Kyi won in 1991 while she was in detention for her opposition to military rule. Later she revealed herself to be a steely politician, her international image tarnished by her denial of targeted abuse against the Rohingya community in her country. Her defence of the army’s persecution of this Muslim minority at the International Court of Justice in The Hague in 2019 was a turning point and led to calls for her to be stripped of her peace prize.

The Nobel Peace Prize committee has never revoked an award

However, the award has never been revoked. Committee members have always maintained that they are not responsible for the actions of laureates once the prize has been awarded.

Abiy Ahmed, a young reformer who ended the 20-year war with Eritrea during his first few months as Ethiopian prime minister, appeared to be a safe bet when he won the prize in 2019. In his acceptance speech, Abiy pledged: ‘I am committed to toil for peace every single day.’ A year later he went to war, re-igniting ethnic conflicts and confounding the hopes of the foreign policy establishment. 

In January 2022, the Oslo-based committee issued a rare admonition, urging an end to the fighting and the dire humanitarian situation in the Tigray region: ‘Abiy Ahmed has a special responsibility to end the conflict and contribute to peace,’ said Berit Reiss-Anderson, chair of the committee. This appears to have had no effect other than to be used as part of the information war by Abiy’s opponents.

Torbjoern Knutsen, an international relations expert at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, says giving an aspirational honour to politicians who find themselves in the global spotlight in order to encourage a political process is always going to be a risk. ‘It’s naive to expect that one individual can overcome all the structural constraints to reform oppressive governments,’ he said. Similarly, many believe the peace prize shared in 1994 by Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin came far too soon.

The committee has been here before. Henry Kissinger won in 1973 for brokering a cease fire in North Vietnam while the United States was also carpet-bombing Cambodia. Unni Turrettini, author of Betraying the Nobel: The Secrets and Corruption Behind the Nobel Peace Prize, claims this was motivated by a desire to strengthen ties with America during the Cold War when Norway was concerned about the threat from the Soviet Union. The US Secretary of State was jointly awarded the prize with Le Duc Tho, special adviser to the North Vietnamese, who declined his half of the award, not least as Kissinger had ordered a bombing raid on Hanoi during the negotiations.

A carrot, a stick and a geopolitical weapon

Other honours, according to Turrettini, a Norwegian lawyer, have been used as ‘both a carrot and a stick, a reward and a geopolitical weapon’. She says the accolade given in 1953 to George Marshall, the former US Secretary of State, was to thank him for his visionary plan to rebuild post-war Europe, Norway included.

Jimmy Carter won in 2002, not only because he deserved the prize but also as, to quote the committee, ‘a kick in the leg’ to President George W Bush for his plans to go to war in Iraq. The same applies to the honour for Al Gore and for the International Atomic Energy Agency and its director Mohamed ElBaradei, a well-known opponent of Bush, according to Turrettini.

Barack Obama was honoured in 2009, barely eight months into his presidency, in a move that stunned everyone including him. Despite standing as an anti-war candidate, by the time Obama attended the ceremony in Oslo, he had approved a 30,000-troop surge in Afghanistan, dashing the committee’s hopes that he could reverse the militarism of the Bush administration.

Knutsen disputes the theory that the prize has been used to push a purely Norwegian political agenda as it often works against the government’s interests. Washington was incensed when Martin Luther King Jr was recognized.

Although the committee knew there would be reprisals, the virulence of Beijing’s retaliation for the Peace Prize honouring Liu Xiaobo, the imprisoned Chinese democracy activist, in 2010 still came as a shock. Norwegian salmon – a popular export – was left to rot in Chinese ports, and relations remained icy for years.

‘Without the Nobel Peace Prize, Liu’s legacy would be completely annihilated,’ says Perry Link, a China expert, as an army of Communist Party censors have expunged all record of him at home.

As soon as the award was announced, Liu’s activist friends were rounded up and his wife was arrested and held for eight years. Despite the outrage and Liu dedicating his prize to those he called the lost souls who died in the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, Perry says it did help improve his prison conditions. He was allowed a microwave and a garden.

Liu’s case sparked a new, and ongoing, threat to the Norwegian Nobel Institute – cyberattacks. The prize draws hundreds of nominees and the list remains secret for 50 years. The committee whittles it down to a shortlist and the winner is decided by majority vote. Deliberations are secret.

The rise of state actor hackers

There have been calls for more transparency but as Olav Njolstad, the secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, explains, they are under attack from state actor hackers who want to know about the candidates and who has nominated them. Their site was targeted during the live-streaming of the award in 2021, which was shared by journalists working in Russia and the Philippines, both regimes known for restricting the freedom of speech vital for democracy and peace.

Maria Ressa, the campaigning Filipina journalist, was one of the laureates in 2021, and, with her award this year, Mohammadi becomes only the 19th female laureate since the prize was first awarded in 1901.

Njolstad has admitted that while the committee has made progress at recognizing more candidates from different regions  to counter a western bias in earlier decades, they could do better on gender. Part of the problem, he says, is that not enough women are nominated. He hopes time will heal this omission.  As for the reputation of the prize, he says it is safe, and remains bullish, asserting: ‘If the award does not cause controversy, it becomes irrelevant.’

This article was updated on 6 December, 2023, to reflect the winner of the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize