The Nobel Peace Prize is one of the six awards given each year to the world’s most elite human rights leaders. Recommending Donald Trump for the most prestigious prize is like nominating a family patriarch from The Godfather for a humanitarian award. That’s exactly what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has done.
Trump’s nomination is not an isolated incident. Since the first award in 1901, the selection process at times has been marred by accusations of sexism, racism and the award committee being Eurocentric. From Kissinger to Yasser Arafat, the Committee had made some controversial picks, engendering criticism and controversy.
After his death in 1896, the will of Swedish explosive manufacturer Alfred Nobel established the Nobel Prize awarded for services to humanity in the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and peace. The Nobel Peace Prize was meant to honour those who ‘had done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations.’
Obama’s presidency would be marked by expanded drone warfare, continued military interventions, and the painful recognition that good intentions don’t eliminate the moral complexities of power.
Like rivers poisoned by industrial run-off, the prize has become contaminated by the very forces it was meant to cleanse. The 1973 prize, the most controversial in history, went to North Vietnamese communist leader Le Duc Tho and the US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for negotiating the Vietnam War ceasefire. Two committee members resigned in protest. Reasons? Kissinger had ordered a massive bombing of Hanoi to ramp up pressure at the negotiating table. He was also under fire for backing Augusto Pinochet’s coup in Chile against democratically elected President Salvador Allende. Tom Lehrer, the American satirical singer, reacted pointedly, ‘Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.’ The New York Times wrote an editorial ‘Nobel Prize for War?’ Kissinger’s co-winner, Tho, became the only person in history to decline the prize, calling the peace ‘not yet really established.’
The 1935 Nobel Peace Prize was retroactively awarded one year later to Carl von Ossietzky, a pacifist at odds with his own country. Carl von, a German journalist, had been imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp for exposing his country’s secret rearmament. In Norway, the right wing vehemently protested against awarding Carl von, maintaining that he was a German prisoner and criminal. Adolf Hitler banned all Germans from receiving any Nobel Prizes in the future.
No award better illustrates the prize’s fundamental problems than Barack Obama’s 2009 win. Obama was in office less than a fortnight when the deadline passed for nominations. The prize was immature and explicitly aspirational. Even Obama seemed uncomfortable, acknowledging he didn’t deserve to be mentioned alongside past laureates like Martin Luther King Jr.
Obama’s presidency would be marked by expanded drone warfare, continued military interventions, and the painful recognition that good intentions don’t eliminate the moral complexities of power. The committee’s choice revealed their fundamental confusion about what peace actually means. Is it simply the absence of war, or does it require justice and human dignity? As Martin Luther King Jr., one of the prize’s most deserving recipients, understood: ‘True peace is not merely the absence of tension, it is the presence of justice.’ The committee’s preference for Obama’s potential over achievement showed their tendency toward diplomatic theatre over the patient work of structural change.
The Nobel Committee consistently overlooks those who embody peace in favour of those who practice it. The committee passed over Mohandas Gandhi despite five nominations. This omission has been publicly regretted by later members of the Committee. 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.”
Eleanor Roosevelt, as the First Lady of the United States, used her platform to advocate for human and civil rights, chaired the UN Commission on Human Rights and helped shape the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She was never honoured. Václav Havel led Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution without a shot being fired, and was ignored. Ken Saro-Wiwa, Sari Nusseibeh, and Corazon Aquino-each of them peace-builders who risked everything to transform conflict into dialogue-were all overlooked. These omissions reveal a deeper problem: When you can ignore Gandhi and reward Kissinger, the prize doesn’t just falter-it forfeits its moral compass.
Netanyahu, himself wanted by the ICC under the Rome Statute for war crimes in Gaza, nominated Trump-his biggest weapons supplier and the staunchest political backer-for the Nobel Peace Prize. This nomination of Donald Trump by Netanyahu, which he described as the ultimate host gift, came at a time when he needed American support for his own political survival. It reveals a troubling evolution of the prize as diplomatic currency. The nomination itself became a transactional tool, less about recognising genuine peace work than about managing international relationships.
Trump’s public campaigning for the prize-tweeting about his worthiness and comparing his achievements to past winners-represents the very misunderstanding of what the award should represent. True peace work requires the hero’s genuine transformation – the death of ego that Joseph Campbell described as essential to serving others. When leaders start lobbying for moral recognition, they’ve already disqualified themselves from deserving it.
The Nobel Peace Prize controversies reflect our conflicted relationship with moral leadership. As the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, “The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world.” The prize’s problems aren’t just about poor choices by the Norwegian Nobel Committee; they’re about the fundamental tension between our moral aspirations and political reality.
Real peace isn’t achieved through grand gestures or diplomatic theatre, but through the patient, unglamorous work of building justice, equality, and mutual understanding. It’s a work that rarely makes headlines and even more rarely receives awards. The Nobel Peace Prize will continue to generate controversy as long as we expect it to reconcile the irreconcilable: the world as it is with the world as it should be. Until we grapple honestly with that tension, the prize will remain less as recognition of achievement than a mirror reflecting our own moral contradictions.
The writer is a freelance columnist based in Lahore.