Peace Prized, Paradise Lost: A Tale of Envy and the Audacity of Hope

Jeremy Adu-Poku,

London, UK

Nobel Prize Medal (Anastasiya D / Unsplash)

10th October. Shortly after 11:00 local time, Jørgen Frydnes, chair of the Nobel Committee, fielded questions from journalists nestled amongst the hallowed halls of the Nobel Institute, Oslo. Extraordinary press coverage was reflective of how this year’s Peace Laureate election had become a cause célèbre, as President Trump sought to further eclipse his democratic predecessors.

At long last, a journalist addressed the orange elephant in the room, describing the saga that had unfolded over the past year, and inquired as to whether the committee understood the potential of their decision to cause a geopolitical incident. In a tersely curated response, Frydnes stressed the importance of ‘integrity’ within the decision-making criteria, dismissing a tidal wave of ‘letters’ of advocacy as having had no bearing on the process.

Maria Machado was awarded Peace Laureate for her ‘tireless work promoting the democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.’ Exiled from the National Assembly since 2014, Machado’s candidacy for the 2024 presidential election was quashed in 2023. However, leveraging her experience running Sumate – an electoral monitoring group – she was instrumental in the organisation of an independent vote count which provided largely irrefutable evidence of President Maduro’s electoral fraud, a feat achieved despite brutal suppression.

Political allies of Trump roundly condemned the committee as politically biased. While ‘stopping 8 wars’ is clearly a facile exaggeration, Trump’s credentials as a peacemaker are not unsubstantiated. The administration orchestrated peace agreements between Rwanda and the DRC, Thailand and Cambodia, and Armenia and Azerbaijan. At the time of writing, the ceasefire agreement and peace framework imposed by Trump on Israel and Hamas still holds. More superfluous claims, such as resolving the May conflict between India and Pakistan, and ending the Iran-Israel‘12-day war’ were more products of circumstance than peace-keeping efforts.  

The choice of a besieged opposition leader has duality, in that it may be interpreted as backhanded criticism of global ‘democratic backsliding’, a phenomenon which could be said to afflict the US because of Trump. Conversely, the choice of a Venezuelan dissident, at a time when the US is tottering towards an open declaration of war against Venezuela, was palatable enough for Trump to congratulate Machado with characteristic humility. However, he maintained the claim that Obama was a less deserving Nobel laureate.

Obama was awarded the 2009 prize in a decision widely regarded as a condemnation of the preceding Bush administration and the US’s catastrophic engagement in Iraq, owing to corruption and a brazen disregard for international frameworks. Obama’s election campaign was characterised by the message of ‘hope’ amid economic hardship and a decline in his state’s international standing because of residual ill feeling towards the US. In defence of the choice, committee chairman Thorbjorn Jagland argued that in the 9 months since Obama took office, ‘the international climate had suddenly improved,’ in the hope that Obama would herald the death of American neoconservatism.

Public reaction evolved from surprise to contempt. Political commentators and, allegedly, the president himself, voiced concern that the award was a ‘premature canonisation’, with great political risk for the administration and the Nobel Institute. The notion of sentiment as a predictor for the future success of a laureate was widely ridiculed across the political spectrum; so great was this concern that Obama contemplated turning down the award.

On receipt of the prize, Obama remarked that ‘the Commander in Chief of the military of a nation in the midst of two wars,’ had been deemed an ideal candidate. His Nobel lecture wrestled with the tension between the desire for peace and the necessity of ‘just war’ – in other words, the justification of the doctrine of ‘peace through strength’. In 2015, the secretary of the Nobel Committee, Geir Lundestad, expressed regret over the 2009 award, lamenting that the ‘committee didn’t achieve what it had hoped for’ – an age of globalised peace. Cynics would view Russian annexation of Crimea, Civil War in Syria, the rise of the Islamic State, and another disastrous US involvement in Libya, while not all attributable to Obama, as a rebuke of the committee’s bold choice, or as the former president would put it, ‘the audacity of hope’.