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And last year it went to someone praising Netanyahu on multiple occasions and tried very hard to kiss Trump’s ass—Trump even got gifted that frigging medal, which was a huge embarrassment for the committee a couple months back. That’s among a long list of extremely questionable recipients. Sure they may have selected the “right” recipient (to some) this year. But why even bother paying attention to a broken clock.
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María Corina Machado has stood up against authoritarianism in Venezuela for more than a decade. I don't think awarding the prize should require that the recipient is a perfect person or holds all of the "correct" opinions according to bystanders who have no skin in the game.
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That vendepatria hasn't stood up to any authoritarianism; all she's done is buddy up with other authoritarians to try to obtain power. Her giving her Peace Prize to Trump might be one of the most humiliating things she could have done.
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I don't put much weight on guilt by association. She's led public protests against the Maduro regime and had to go into hiding to escape imprisonment. She's advocated for free and fair elections, rule of law, separation of powers, civil liberties, decentralization, private property, and competitive markets. Can you explain how those actions and ideas are authoritarian?
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She also advocated for the USA to invade her country to depose Maduro. That alone should disqualify her from a Peace prize.
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Can you explain how you can praise Trump if you

> advocated for free and fair elections, rule of law, separation of powers, civil liberties, decentralization, private property, and competitive markets.

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Venezuela is America's bitch. As is much of South America with the honourable exceptions of Mexico and Cuba.
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She genuinely fcked that one tho. Despite having skin in the game, that was one big loosing move.
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The Peace Prize seems somewhat hit or miss. I'm sure we all remember when it was given to Barack Obama for his lifelong work of not being George W Bush. And of course it was given to Henry Effin' Kissinger.

Maybe this speaks to the difficulty of peace in general. One asshole warmonger can destroy thousands of lives on a whim, but ending or preventing war takes long, steady efforts by large numbers of people. It's not very amenable to an individual prize.

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Looking at the history it was awarded to organizations a decent number of times in the past, (even up to Nihon Hidankyo in 2024 which focuses on impact from Nagasaki/Hiroshima and anti-atomic weapon advocacy)....

which to your point does seem to make more sense than singling out an individual.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_Peace_Prize_laur...

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I think the best recipients tend to be those who are involved in "structural" work to advance the cause of peace, rather than those who have been involved in helping settle specific conflicts.

For example, consider the difference between the first five recipients (all for founding various influential peace organisations) vs the sixth (for negotiating an end to the Russo-Japanese War).

In that respect, Pillay seems one of the better laureates of recent years.

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I think people are making a mistake when they view the Peace Prize as an evaluation of a person's character or their entire career. Often it's targeting specific negotiations or treaties, which in retrospect were failed attempts at peace. This applies to Kissinger in the case of the Paris Peace Accords, Begin/Sadat for the Camp David Accords, Arafat/Peres/Rabin for the Oslo Accords, etc.
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I can’t comment on the others, but this perspective doesn’t really make Kissinger’s case any better. Even his co-winner thought it was ridiculous and refused the prize.
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Many "hard science" Nobel prize recipients also turned out to be complete embarrassment of themselves... There is even a name for that. "Nobel disease".
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These horrible Nobel Peace Prize recipients (and in some cases, Literature Prize recipients as well) are nothing like “Nobel disease”. Said recipient was praising the genocide perpetrator and war criminal (according to this year’s recipient, ironically) as well as performing the ass kissing and inviting foreign invasion before the award was given. The committee bestowed the award knowing very well what they’re getting into, and time and time again it’s nothing more than a political endorsement of a specific kind of “peace”—well, if you consider inviting foreign invasion an act of peace. Actually it’s more like endorsement of a particular ideology, sometimes not even peaceful.
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I mean, if the really gave the prize to Trump, they would completely destroy their credibility. That's better left to FIFA (not that FIFA had a lot of credibility before creating a peace prize to award it to Trump).
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The committee is independent from politics although some dictators may at times misunderstand that.
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Where does it say that the Norwegian Nobel Committee is independent from politics?

As stated on their webpage, "As far as possible, the composition of the Committee is to reflect the relative strengths of the political parties in the Storting." - https://www.nobelpeaceprize.org/nobel-committee/

It is independent to the sitting Norwegian government, as members can't have current seats both in the committee and Storting, but several committee do represent the political parties in Norway.

Currently the committee is made from former Leader of the Centre Party, a foreign policy scholar and writer, former Conservative Party cabinet member that was the Minister of Education and Research, a Political scientist and Chief Executive Officer of Utøya AS, and last the former Labour Party Foreign Affairs Secretary.

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I find it hard to see how the committee can be genuinely independent of politics when its members are appointed by the Norwegian Parliament.
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Norway is one of the few countries in the world that has ”fuck you” money and a functioning representative electoral system. If the parliament appoints the committee, I find it politically suicidal for any representative to dare to directly interfere with the commissions deliberation and choices. There’s hardly anything positive to gain from it for a representative.
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Asle Toje was appointed by FRP and is very much a political appointed member. While there is not really any indication of meddling by political parties with the committee the appointment is very much politically governed.
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how does this imply that they can be disconnected from politics, some may argue on the contrary due to what you just stated.
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It cannot be disconnected from politics. The other poster mentioned independence.
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The only country that has "fuck you" anything is unfortunately the US.
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The current US administration and its voting population is making sure that this won't be the case soon. It's gonna be hard to win back the good will that was built through decades of diplomacy and trade. Even harder when their conventional armed forces have been underwhelming in the attack on Iran.
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Let's be clear that this is just an opinion and ignores China for example.
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I think recent events have proven otherwise. Asymmetric warfare hurts the big guy more than it hurts the little one. The US was only ever in charge of the world order because most of it's power was not through military action. The threat is there, sure, but the US built most of it's empire off of soft power and diplomacy. Ironically, flexing it's military muscles too much is one of the few sure ways of destroying the American hegemony.
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Good old Roosevelt’s “Talk softly and carry a big stick” worked really well.
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american hegemony has been on the decline for decades. flexing its military is a last ditch attempt to reverse course, it’s not the beginning of the decline. whether it works or not is up for debate and for the future to hold, but what isn’t up for debate is that the soft power gig clearly wasn’t working.
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If you say so. I think the fact that the US has been the most powerful country for the last 75 years or so has been pretty undisputed, but different realities for different folks i guess
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Alas, in US art and civic culture, "you" refers to those eligible to serve in the armed forces.
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"independent from politics" seems to have a few different meanings. One is inherently bad and another is not necessarily bad. Of course the committee is political and the entire nature of the award is political.
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There's always FIFA to give out a prize if necessary.
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I am actually curious who will win the FIFA peace prize next year? Or is it handled out annually?
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I think it will only ever have one winner. They may win it again next year (clearly spreading peace throughout the world), but they will be the GOAT for FIFA peace prize winners.
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They have really not made the impression that they are independent of politics, all laureates taken together. But if they improve I'm all for it.
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They have opinions and moral values. And a lot of times they coincide with western democracy ideals.

Or - like today - with rules based global world order.

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You remember Machado though...

Peace prize for someone who was literally arguing for subjecting her own country to an invasion and foreign occupation.

I remember how Swedish state television suddenly flipped very after that, and started cuddling Cuban exiles who wanted the same there. I think this whole thing was certainly coordinated somehow, behind the scenes in order to attempt to legitmize a future US invasion of Venezuela and their general conduct in the Carribean and South America /Pacific.

Things like this happened during expulsion of the Karabach-Armenians too. Then SVT went out and said that "Armenian separatists [had] agreed to leave Azerbaijan", and they left out the artillery bombardement, the deaths by starvation and the ICJ judgement against Azerbaijan's closure of the Lachine corridor, even though such a judgement by an organization like the ICJ would otherwise by first-page news.

So while I can't be sure that there's some NATO-internal press office coordinating how planned future military activity by members is to be presented in the media, it seems that Turkey could achieve that, and that the US could achieve that.

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This is all rather OT, but I thought the general Western mainstream coverage of the Artsakh ethnic cleansing was disgraceful. We're talking about an ethnic community of ~120K that was expelled from land where they've lived for at least a millenium. Does that even get a footnote relative to Palestine? Also Israel's role in arming Azerbaijan (including with suicide drones) was disgracefully unexamined (likewise Russia's abdication of responsibility to a CSTO member).
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It's possible the Azerbaijan/Armenia thing and lack of outcry or attention helped Russia/Ukraine, Israel/Gaza, Sudan/Darfur, etc get rolling.

When you have revanchast or expansionist power see another one "get away with it" they think to themselves "now is my time to do some dirty work."

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Yeah, I guess they act independently from international courts.
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How do you mean, and who?

If you mean Swedish state television, what I meant was that any such major judgement by a UN court like the ICJ, would be front page news.

Remember, this stuff was subject to long and incredibly annoying thing in the Security Council as well, and SVT ignored that too. It was the biggest thing that happened that whole year, basically and the entire coverage by SVT were those words I quoted in the comment before this, that "Armenian separatists have agreed to leave Azerbaijan".

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The Norwegian nobel prize committee. (Your post was heavily edited, if you think i missed some point.)
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Yeah, I can be slow in getting them finished.

But at that point I can't have mentioned the ICJ stuff, can I? Hmm. Oh well. I get what I get for my editing.

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Fine, i also prefer being able to edit my comments.
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So put them in a draft rather than polluting the thread and making people guess what you meant.

Is your opinion so important that the world needs a quick draft first urgently before you’ve thought about what you want to say properly?

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Well, if I didn't think it was interesting I wouldn't post it. Then of course you reassess and start to wonder whether that initial remark really was worth it, and then your comments begins to evolve, and then you have done this for years and it becomes a style where the evolution of the comment expresses uncertainty and causation.

I always avoid genuinely changing the comments though, appending only, and ceasing to append in case someone responds before I'm done.

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The committee in this case is based on retired or ageing Norwegian politicians. That's the construction that we can't do so much about (the will), but I think it's unfortunate for the prize. I think a more independent committee would have been better. I agree with the common criticism that they have given several prizes too rashly or too soon.
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They also had connections to Epstein

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_of_Thorbj%C3%B8rn...

I am not sure another committee would do much better though. How would they be chosen? At least these are people with a lot of experience in foreign affairs.

And at the end of the day - it is their price to govern. If they do a bad job, the world will move on.

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I think that's fair, and they only get as much importance and attention as we give them.
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The committee is selected by the Norwegian parliament, a political body.
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And there is a long history of allegations of additional political influence beyond that.
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It is not really. They claim so but the members are appointed by the Norwegian government. One of the members, Asle Toje, is very much a political appointed member by the right-wing FRP party.

This process is decided by the Alfred Nobel will.

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They're so independent from politics they gave a Peace Prize to President "Drone Strikes" Obama after he was in office for merely a year.
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giving the prize to Obama was not political at all.

/s

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It was political, quite possibly a mistake.

But it was most likely not requested by the Norwegian government.

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As dubious as some of the things Obama did, nothing will ever beat Henry Kissinger winning it.

At least Aung San Suu Kyi waited until after her award to do some genocide.

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what’s wrong with authoritarianism?
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i think there are plenty of books written about the topic. Im not sure hacker news is the best place to get your answer.
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It seems like both sides want it, but only one admits to wanting it.
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