This year’s Nobel Peace Prizes come with a warning label attached

On Friday, 10 December, in Oslo, Norway, this year’s Nobel Peace Prize was formally awarded to two genuine global journalist-heroes, Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov. Ressa is the veteran Filipino-American journalist who came into her own as a fearless CNN correspondent in Southeast Asia and then went on to build her own online news service, Grappler.  

Her publication resolutely continues taking on the corrupt dictatorship-lite that has been Rodrigo Duterte’s trademark in the Philippines for years. For her efforts, she has been harassed, fined and arrested repeatedly by the government over the years — even for crimes not yet on the statute books at the time when the alleged offence had taken place.

Ressa grew up in the US after leaving the Philippines as a young child. She eventually returned to the Philippines via a Fulbright scholarship, following her degree from Princeton University. She stayed on — and built her career there as a journalist. As a kind of credo, Ressa once told a televised interview, “When you don’t have facts... you don’t have a shared reality, you can’t have democracy.”

Muratov’s publication, Novaya Gazeta, meanwhile, has become the leading, and perhaps the only still-standing, truly independent media operation in Russia that has the backbone to report in detail on the Putin administration’s anti-democratic behaviour. Such reporting is not universally popular in the Kremlin, and the paper has had seven of its investigative reporters killed while working on stories that could embarrass the government. Interestingly, an infusion of funds from Mikhail Gorbachev’s own Nobel Peace Prize years earlier had helped get Novaya Gazeta started.  

Muratov has wryly explained that his thrice-weekly publication continues on as a print publication due to more than just an editor’s sentimental attachment to the smell of ink and newsprint. Instead, it is his very unsentimental rationale, he says, that in Russian prisons the internet is unavailable to the inmates. 

The Nobel Peace Prize is one of the five prizes established by the terms of Swedish chemist-engineer Alfred Nobel’s original bequest. The others are for physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, and literature. An economics prize has been created more recently and funded by the Swedish central bank. 

Over the years, despite some controversies, the prizes have come to be seen as a kind of gold standard for weighing the impact of individuals and ideas in the world. Affixing the label “Nobel Prize-winning” to a person’s name has become almost axiomatic in pointing out that person’s global importance, and, in the case of the Peace Prize, giving them a kind of secular sainthood. 

Nonetheless, commentators like Fareed Zakaria argue that there is a contradiction inherent in the Peace Prize. Sometimes the prizes are bestowed upon flawed peacemakers like Menachem Begin or Yasser Arafat (those who “would make peace are, after all, politicians” in Zakaria’s understanding). Moreover, some awards also run the risk of acknowledging people who may turn around and sin again in the future, after the ceremony, the medal and the cheque, as seems to be the case with Ethiopia’s current leader, Abiy Ahmed.

In accordance with the terms of Nobel’s bequest, the Peace Prize was to be awarded to the person (or organisation) who in the preceding year “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”. 

While the other prizes are determined by committees based in Sweden, the Peace Prize award is determined by a five-member committee appointed by the Norwegian Parliament. The reason for the split between awarding committees is largely because at the time of the original Nobel bequest, Sweden and Norway were one nation, united under the Swedish monarchy. 

Those authorised to nominate for the prize include a wide range of individuals around the world. Nominators can be members of national assemblies and governments and members of the Inter-Parliamentary Union; members of the Permanent Court of Arbitration and the International Court of Justice at the Hague; members of Institut de Droit International; academics at the professor or associate professor level in history, social sciences, philosophy, law and theology; university rectors, university directors (or their equivalents); directors of peace research and international affairs institutes; previous prize recipients, including board members of organisations that have received the prize; present and past members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee; and former permanent advisers to the Norwegian Nobel Institute. Keep that list at hand, in case readers have someone in mind to be nominated for the prize in 2022. 

2021 Nobel Peace Prize winners Maria Ressa (left) and Dmitry Muratov (right) receive their awards during the ceremony at the City Hall in Oslo, Norway, on 10 December 2021. They were awarded the prize for their efforts to entrench freedom of expression. (Photo: EPA-EFE / Stian Lysberg Solum / Pool)