The Nobel Peace Prize (Swedish,
Danish
and Norwegian: Nobels fredspris)
is one of five Nobel Prizes bequeathed by
the Swedish industrialist and inventor Alfred
Nobel. According to Nobel's will,
the Peace Prize should be awarded "to the person who shall have done the
most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or
reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace
congresses."[1]
Alfred Nobel's will stated that the prize should be awarded by a committee of
five people elected by the Norwegian Parliament.
Nobel died in 1896 and did not leave an explanation for choosing peace as a prize
category. The categories for chemistry and physics were obvious choices as he was a trained chemical
engineer. The reason behind the peace prize is less clear. Scholars who studied
Nobel have said it was Nobel's way to compensate for developing destructive
forces (Nobel's inventions included dynamite and ballistite).
None of his explosives, except for ballistite, were used in any war during his
lifetime,[2]
although the Irish Republican Brotherhood, an Irish
nationalist organisation, did carry out dynamite attacks in the 1880s[3]
and he was instrumental in turning Bofors from an iron company to an armaments company whilst he
owned it.
The Nobel Institute in Oslo,
Norway.
The Norwegian
Parliament appoints the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which selects
the Laureate for the Peace Prize. The Committee chairman, currently Thorbjørn Jagland, presents the Prize to the
laureate at the award ceremony. At the time of Alfred Nobel's death Sweden and Norway were in a personal
union in which the Swedish government was solely responsible for foreign
policy, and the Norwegian Parliament was responsible only for Norwegian
domestic policy. Alfred Nobel never explained why he wanted a Norwegian rather
than Swedish body to award the Peace Prize.[4]
As a consequence, many people have speculated about Nobel's intentions. For
instance, Nobel may have wanted to prevent the manipulation of the selection
process by foreign powers, and as
[edit] Nominations
Nominations for the Prize may be made by a broad array of qualified
individuals, including former recipients, members of national assemblies and
congresses, university professors (in certain disciplines), international
judges, and special advisors to the Prize Committee. In 2009, a record 205
nominations were received.[5]
The Committee keeps the nominations secret and asks that nominators do the
same. Over time many individuals have become known as "Nobel Peace Prize
Nominees", but this designation has no official standing.[6]
Nominations from 1901 to 1955, however, have been released in a database.[7]
When the past nominations were released it was discovered that Adolf
Hitler was nominated in 1939 by Erik Brandt, a member of the Swedish
Parliament. Brandt retracted the nomination after a few days.[8]
Other infamous nominees included Joseph
Stalin and Benito Mussolini. However, since nomination
requires only support from one qualified person (e.g., a history professor),
these unusual nominations do not represent the opinions of the Nobel committee
itself.[citation needed]
Unlike the other Nobel Prizes, which recognize completed scientific or
literary accomplishment, the Nobel Peace Prize may be awarded to persons or
organizations that are in the process of resolving a conflict or creating
peace. As some such processes have failed to create lasting peace, some Peace
Prizes appear questionable in hindsight. For example, the awards given to Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow
Wilson, Shimon Peres, Yitzhak
Rabin, Yasser Arafat, Lê Ðức Thọ, and Henry
Kissinger were particularly controversial and criticized; the Kissinger-Thọ
award prompted two dissenting Committee members to resign.[9]
In 2005, the Nobel Peace Center opened. It serves to present
the Laureates, their work for peace, and the ongoing problems of war and
conflict around the world.
For more details on this topic, see Nobel Prize controversies.
The Nobel Peace Prize has sparked controversy throughout its history. The
Norwegian Parliament, which appoints the Peace Prize Committee, has no say in
the award issue. Critics[who?] argue that the same
Parliament has pursued partisan military aims. A member of the Committee cannot
at the same time be a member of the Parliament, and the Committee includes
former members from all major parties, including those parties that oppose NATO
membership[citation needed].
Unlike the scientific and literary Nobel Prizes, usually issued in retrospect,
often two or three decades after the awarded achievement, the Peace Prize has
been awarded for more recent or immediate achievements taking the form of summary
judgment being issued in the same year as or the year immediately following
the political act. Some commentators[who?] have suggested that to
award a peace prize on the basis of unquantifiable contemporary opinion is
unjust or possibly erroneous, especially as many of the judges cannot
themselves be said to be impartial observers. In pro-democracy struggles, it
may be said[who?] that the 'real'
peace-makers may not be recognized for their long-term or subtle approaches.
However, others[who?] have pointed to the uniqueness
of the Peace Prize in that its high profile can often focus world attention on
particular problems and possibly aid in the peace-efforts themselves.
The 14th Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond
Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize laureates.
On closer inspection, the peace-laureates often have a lifetime's history of
working at and promoting humanitarian issues, as in the examples of German
medic Albert Schweitzer (1952 laureate), Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., an African-American
civil
rights activist (1964 laureate) and Aung
San Suu Kyi, a Buddhist nonviolent pro-democracy activist (1991 laureate).
Still others are selected for tireless efforts, as in the examples of Jimmy
Carter and Mohamed ElBaradei. Others, even today, are quite
controversial, due to the recipient's political activity, as in the case of Henry
Kissinger (1973 laureate), Menachem
Begin and Anwar Sadat (1978 laureates), Mikhail
Gorbachev (1990 laureate), Yitzhak
Rabin and Yasser Arafat (1994 laureates), or Barack
Obama (2009 laureate)[10].
A criticism of the peace-prize are the notable omissions, namely the failure
to award individuals with widely recognized contributions to peace. The list
includes Mahatma Gandhi, Herbert
Hoover, Corazon Aquino, Pope
John XXIII, Pope John Paul II, Dorothy Day,
César Chávez, Oscar
Romero, Jose Figueres Ferrer, Steve Biko,
Raphael
Lemkin, Abdul Sattar Edhi, and Irena
Sendler. In particular, the omission of the Indian leader Gandhi
has been widely discussed, including public statements by the various members
of Nobel Committee.[11][12]
It has been acknowledged by the committee that Gandhi was nominated in 1937,
1938, 1939, 1947 and, finally, a few days before he was murdered in January
1948.[13]
The omission has been publicly regretted by later members of the Nobel
Committee.[11]
In 1948, the year of Gandhi's death, the Nobel Committee declined to award a
prize on the ground that "there was no suitable living candidate"
that year. Later, when the Dalai Lama was awarded the Peace Prize in 1989, the
chairman of the committee said that this was "in part a tribute to the
memory of Mahatma Gandhi".[14]
Day has also been acknowledged as having been nominated for the Prize:[15]
in fact some biographers have thought her pacifism too
radical for the Nobel judges.[16]
In most cases, the omissions resulted in part from the provision in Alfred
Nobel's will that only living people could receive the prize.
Research by anthropologist David Stoll into Rigoberta Menchú, the 1992 recipient, revealed some
fabrications in her biography, "Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació
la conciencia" (My name is Rigoberta Menchú and this is how my conscience
was born), translated into English as "I, Rigoberta Menchú". Menchú later
admitted changing some details about her background. After the initial
controversy, the Nobel Committee dismissed calls to revoke her Nobel prize
because of the reported falsifications. Professor Geir Lundestad, the secretary
of the Committee, said her prize "was not based exclusively or primarily
on the autobiography".[17]
According to the Nobel Committee, "Stoll approves of her Nobel prize and
has no question about the picture of army atrocities which she presents. He
says that her purpose in telling her story the way she did 'enabled her to
focus international condemnation on an institution that deserved it, the Guatemalan
army."