Blessed are the peacemakers. But cursed are those of us who try to stomach what the Nobel Peace Prize process has become.
Just take a look at this year’s nominees. Alongside Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, other nominees include famed election-results-denier Stacey Abrams, teenage Trump scold Greta Thunberg, the Black Lives Matter movement, and former President Donald Trump.
Navalny, through his courage, has become an important symbol in the fight against Russia’s increasingly totalitarian government. Even fellow nominee Jared Kushner helped broker one of the most significant negotiations in the Middle East, which resulted in the normalization of relations between Israel and neighboring nations such as the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco.
So, what are the others doing in this conversation? What is Stacey Abrams’s contribution to world peace? Best known for refusing to concede Georgia’s 2018 gubernatorial race and publicly campaigning for the vice presidency during the 2020 election, she helped black turnout in one state almost keep up with skyrocketing white turnout. That’s hardly Elie Wiesel material.
And the Black Lives Matter movement? While the movement’s voices spoke up on crucial issues such as criminal justice reform, its protests-turned-riots wreaked havoc in cities across the United States for weeks on end. As the media once put it, Black Lives Matter’s demonstrations were “mostly peaceful” and overtly political.
It’s worth noting that both Abrams and Black Lives Matter were nominated by members of the Norwegian Parliament: Abrams was nominated for her “efforts to complete [Martin Luther King Jr.’s] work,” and Black Lives Matter was nominated for spurring “an important worldwide movement to fight racial injustice.” In other words, both were nominated because of what they represent, not because of what they accomplished.
This is a massive departure from the Nobel Peace Prize’s original purpose. According to its will, the prize was to be awarded “to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations and the abolition or reduction of standing armies and the formation and spreading of peace congresses.” If the committee still stuck to these standards, only Kushner would be technically eligible for the award.
But like so much else, the Nobel Peace Prize has become a shallow political statement — one that appears to indicate significance, but in fact means pretty much nothing at all.
