# Nobel Peace Prize Awarded annually by the **Norwegian Nobel Committee** under the terms of [[Alfred Nobel]]'s will, 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. First awarded in **1901**, to the founder of the Red Cross. It is the only Nobel awarded in Oslo; every other one is awarded in Stockholm. This page exists because the vault referred to the prize on roughly two dozen pages without ever defining it, and because two separate things get called "the Nobel" in political argument — the award, and the nomination. ## How it actually works - The committee has **five members, elected by the Storting**, Norway's parliament, to six-year terms, renewable. The chair since 2021 is Jørgen Watne Frydnes. Nobel's will specified a Norwegian committee even though Nobel himself was Swedish. - **Nominations close 31 January** each year and may be submitted only by qualified nominators — sitting national legislators and cabinet ministers, heads of state, certain judges and professors, past laureates, and current and former committee members. Self-nomination is not considered. - **Nominations are confidential for 50 years.** That covers nominees, nominators, and the committee's own investigations and opinions. The committee does not announce nominee names, to the press or to the candidates themselves. > [!important] ⭐ A nomination is not a shortlisting, and the committee will neither confirm nor deny one for half a century > Because the nominator pool runs to thousands of people worldwide and the committee never comments, **anyone can announce that they have nominated anyone**, and the claim is unfalsifiable until the archive opens. The announcement is therefore evidence about the nominator, not about the nominee. > > This recurs in the vault as a credential claim. [[Alan Dershowitz]] nominated [[Jared Kushner]], Avi Berkowitz, David Friedman and Ron Dermer for the prize over the [[Abraham Accords]]. Treat every "nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize" in this vault as a statement someone made, never as a status the committee conferred. ## The paradox at the origin The endowment is dynamite money. Nobel invented it, manufactured arms, and left his fortune to fund a peace prize — the cleanest miniature of the [[Merchants of Death]] thesis the vault has: the same wealth that profits from destruction funding the institutions that claim to oppose it. Whether that is redemption or laundering is the argument; that it is the structure is not. ## The prize as rebuke The committee's sharpest instrument is timing, and it has used the prize to answer American power more than once. | Year | Laureate | Read at the time as | |---|---|---| | 2005 | [[Mohamed ElBaradei]] and the IAEA | A rebuke to Washington over the [[Iraq War]] — the verification process the invasion overrode, honoured two years after it was overridden. [[Hans Blix]] is the other half of that story | | 2025 | [[María Corina Machado]] | Recognition of a documented stolen election, eleven months before she was excluded from the negotiation over what replaced the government that stole it | | 2026 | [[Navi Pillay]] | Explicit. The announcement said that "today, as these same judges are sanctioned, and their institutions are attacked, we need people of courage, vision and determination" | The 2026 award is the most direct case the vault holds. Pillay sat on the [[International Criminal Court]]'s bench from 2003 to 2008 and currently sits on the [[International Court of Justice]] in the Myanmar genocide case. **Hours after her award was announced on 9 October 2026, the United States added the ICC itself to the Specially Designated Nationals list under [[Executive Order 14203]].** Two institutions read the same institution on the same afternoon and reached opposite verdicts. ## The prize as contested judgment The committee's misses are as instructive as its hits, because they show the award being made on intention rather than record. - **1973 — [[Henry Kissinger]]**, for the Paris accords. Le Duc Tho declined his half. The accords collapsed within two years and Saigon fell in April 1975. - **2009 — [[Barack Obama]]**, awarded before any major action, and followed by a drone-strike program that expanded the executive's unilateral targeted-killing apparatus. - **2019 — [[Abiy Ahmed]]**, awarded in October for the Eritrea peace. **Thirteen months later he ordered the offensive that began the [[Tigray War]].** Abiy is the hardest case: not a premature award that aged poorly but one whose recipient went on to prosecute a war. It is the strongest available argument that the prize rewards a moment rather than a person. ## Laureates and nominees with pages in this vault Individuals: [[Theodore Roosevelt]] · [[Martin Luther King Jr.]] · [[Henry Kissinger]] · [[Nelson Mandela]] · [[Yitzhak Rabin]] · [[Jimmy Carter]] · [[Shirin Ebadi]] · [[Mohamed ElBaradei]] · [[Al Gore]] · [[Barack Obama]] · [[Abiy Ahmed]] · [[Anne Applebaum]] · [[Narges Mohammadi]] · [[María Corina Machado]] · [[Navi Pillay]] Organizations and movements: [[Amnesty International]] · [[American Friends Service Committee]] · [[The IPCC]] · [[Woman Life Freedom]] Adjacent: [[Alfred Nobel]] (the endowment) · [[The Green Revolution]] (Borlaug, 1970) · [[Charmian Gooch]] · [[Alan Dershowitz]] (nominator, not laureate) · [[Nicolás Maduro]] ## Why It Matters Here The prize is a **non-state verdict on state behaviour**, which is why it keeps turning up in this vault's international-law material. It has no enforcement power whatsoever — and that is precisely what makes the reaction to it informative. When a government responds to an award by sanctioning the institution the laureate served, the award has located something the government would rather not have located. It also runs the other way. The prize is an authority claim, and authority claims get appropriated. The nomination loophole above is the mechanism: a credential that sounds conferred but is only asserted. A vault that tracks how legitimacy gets manufactured needs the distinction written down somewhere, and this is the page. ## See Also - [[Alfred Nobel]] — the will, the fortune and its source - [[Navi Pillay]] — 2026 laureate · [[María Corina Machado]] — 2025 laureate - [[International Criminal Court]] and [[Executive Order 14203]] — designated the same day as the 2026 award - [[International Court of Justice]] — where the 2026 laureate currently sits - [[Merchants of Death]] — the thesis the endowment illustrates - [[International Law Hub]] — the folder MOC - [[Human Rights]] · [[Rule of Law]]