The Nobel Prize season ended last month when winners of the six different awards were announced for their outstanding accomplishments in fields ranging from medicine to literature. But over the years, no award has generated more controversy than the Nobel Peace Prize.
This year’s Peace Prize to the Japanese atomic bomb survivors’ group Nihon Hidankyo came as a surprise, signifying a welcome respite from the award’s increasing politicization.
The six prizes, each worth 10 million Swedish kronor ($917,000), are named after Alfred Nobel, a wealthy Swedish industrialist who made his fortune selling cannons and munitions, including the explosives he invented — dynamite and gelignite. The prizes are handed out on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s 1896 death. While the Peace Prize winner is selected and honored in Norway, the other Nobel awardees are chosen by the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm, where the prizes are handed out.
Alfred Nobel’s will stipulated that the Peace Prize should go 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.”
But an examination of the 104 Peace Prizes awarded since 1901 shows that this prize has not developed in line with what Nobel laid down. As the official Peace Prize website acknowledges, the parameters for selecting a winner have expanded over the decades to include humanitarian work, democracy and human rights, climate and environmental change and other issues.
Worse still, the Peace Prize committee in Oslo has increasingly allowed geopolitical considerations to guide the selection of an awardee. In fact, the Nobel Peace Prize has become more about geopolitics than about peace. Consequently, the prize over the years has gone to a number of undeserving recipients. The prize runs the risk of losing its legitimacy.
President Barack Obama had been in office for less than one year when the Norwegian Nobel Committee decided in 2009 to award him the Peace Prize for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples” and “his work for a world without nuclear weapons.”
The stunning decision was met with criticism in the U.S., including from some Obama supporters. He received the prize not for his accomplishments but merely for succeeding President George W. Bush, whose invasion of Iraq on false pretenses made him deeply unpopular internationally.
Far from being a peacemaker, Obama in office relied, like Bush, on hard power, even as he deplored the ethos of “might makes right.” Obama waged serial military campaigns from Somalia and Yemen to Iraq and Syria. His 2011 U.S.-led military campaign removing Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi from power created an enduring failed state, while his effort to overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad helped spawn the terrorist Islamic State organization.
And while championing “a nuclear-free world,” Obama led an extensive modernization of the American nuclear arsenal, stoking a new arms race.
Another Nobel Prize recipient, Muhammad Yunus, today presides over rampant human rights abuses in Bangladesh. In August, the 84-year-old Yunus was installed as head of an interim regime by the country’s powerful military, which, capitalizing on deadly violent protests, packed Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina off to neighboring India before she could formally resign.
Yunus pioneered microcredit, or giving small loans to rural families, for which he and the Grameen Bank that he headed jointly received a Nobel Prize in 2006 — not in economics but for peace, after former President Bill Clinton lobbied for him. While presenting Yunus with the Peace Prize, the head of the Norwegian Nobel Committee said, “In 2002, Bill Clinton put it this way: ‘Dr. Yunus is a man who long ago should have won the Nobel Prize and I’ll keep saying that until they finally give it to him.’ Now Clinton will no longer need to remind us.”
Underscoring the award’s geopolitical agenda, the committee chairman hoped that “this peace prize will represent a possible approach to the Muslim part of the world” given the post-9/11 tendency to “demonize Islam.” He added, “It is an important task for the Nobel Committee to try to narrow the gap between the West and Islam.”
Bangladesh, with Yunus as the regime’s nominal head, is today effectively under military-clerical rule and faces a growing risk of sliding into chaos. The country is wracked by Islamist attacks, including on religious and ethnic minorities; extrajudicial killings; and arbitrary arrests, with the regime jailing thousands just last month.
The Peace Prize has even gone to people who did more to scuttle peace than to promote it. One such awardee was Henry Kissinger, whose disastrous decisions while serving under President Richard Nixon resulted in immense death and destruction across vast regions, including the U.S. carpet-bombing of Cambodia and Laos. North Vietnamese leader Le Duc Tho, who was jointly awarded the prize with Kissinger, declined his half of the spoils, as he did not want to share the award with a war hawk.
The Peace Prize Committee has often demonstrated its geopolitical activism by awarding the prize to Western-backed anti-regime activists in the developing world, from Aung San Suu Kyi to Liu Xiaobo, or by seeking to promote the bridging of regional divides. For example, the 2014 prize was given jointly to a Pakistani Muslim and an Indian Hindu.
Against this background, the Peace Prize has become not only increasingly controversial but also, as one author put it, “the world’s most reviled award.” This year’s uncontroversial award to the Japanese organization of survivors of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki may be an effort to restore international faith in the prize.
But for such an effort to succeed, the Peace Prize Committee must no longer give the award to make a geopolitical point. It should stick to Alfred Nobel’s mandate that the prize be given for international peace and disarmament — not for human rights promotion, civil rights work, environmental protection, economic opportunities for the poor or antigovernment activism.
Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of nine books, including the award-winning “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”
