Nobel Peace Prize

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Swedish economist and Nobel Prize Laureate Dag Hammarskjöld was an unusually active UN Secretary-General from 1953 to his death in 1961.

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. The Peace Prize is presented annually in Oslo, Norway, in the presence of the king, on December 10 (the anniversary of Nobel's death), and is the only Nobel Prize not presented in Stockholm, Sweden. "In Oslo, the Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee presents the Nobel Peace Prize in the presence of the King of Norway. Under the eyes of a watching world, the Nobel Laureate receives three things: a diploma, a medal and a document confirming the prize amount." The Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony is held at the Oslo City Hall, followed the next day by the Nobel Peace Prize Concert, which is broadcast to more than 450 million households in over 150 countries around the world. The concert has received worldwide fame and the participation of top celebrity hosts and performers. The selection of Nobel Peace Prize winners sometimes causes controversy, as it has become greatly politicized and not related to issues of peace and the list of winners includes people who formerly used violence and terrorism, but then later made exceptional concessions to non-violence in the attempt to achieve peace.

[edit] Appointment process

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 Dr. Ole Danbolt Mjøs, awards the Prize himself. 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^[4] why he wanted a Norwegian rather than Swedish body to award the Peace Prize. 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 Norway did not have any foreign policy, the Norwegian government could not be influenced.

[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 some years as many as 199 nominations have been received. 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^[5]. Nominations from 1901 to 1955, however, have been released in a database.^[6] 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.^[7] 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.

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, Martin Luther King Jr., 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.^[8]

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.

[edit] Controversy

This section contains weasel words, vague phrasing that often accompanies biased or unverifiable information. Such statements should be clarified or removed. (July 2008)

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 winners. Photo by Carey Linde, 2004

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), Mother Teresa, a Roman Catholic missionary nun (1979 laureate), Tenzin Gyatso (1989), Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat (1978 laureates), or Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat (1994 laureates).

A widely discussed^[who?] 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, Corazon Aquino, Pope John XXIII, Pope John Paul II, Steve Biko, Raphael Lemkin, Abdul Sattar Edhi, César Chávez, Jose Figueres Ferrer, Irena Sendler, and Oscar Romero. In particular, the omission of the Indian leader Gandhi has been widely discussed, including public statements by the various members of Nobel Committee.^[9][10] 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.^[11] The omission has been publicly regretted by later members of the Nobel Committee.^[9] 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."^[12] 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".^[13] 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."

[edit] List of Laureates

[edit] Notes

[edit] See also

• Atoms for Peace Award
• Gandhi Peace Prize
• Lenin Peace Prize
• Nobel Prize
• Norwegian Nobel Committee
• Magsaysay Award
• Sweden-Norway

[edit] External links

• "All Nobel Laureates in Peace" – Index webpage on the official site of the Nobel Foundation.
• "The Nobel Peace Prize" – Official webpage of the Norwegian Nobel Institute for the Norwegian Nobel Committee.
• "The Nobel Prize Award Ceremonies" – Official hyperlinked webpage of the Nobel Foundation.
• "The Nobel Prize in Peace" – Official site of the Nobel Foundation.
• "The Nobel Prize Medals and the Medal for the Prize in Economics" – By Birgitta Lemmel; an article on the history of the design of the medals featured on the official site.
• "The Nomination Database for the Nobel Prize in Peace, 1901-1955" – Database featured on the official site of the Nobel Foundation.
• "What the Nobel Laureates Receive" – Featured link in "The Nobel Prize Award Ceremonies".