Rewarding the feats that have made the world a better place: the Nobel Prizes awarded from Monday will try to instill a glimmer of optimism in a world threatened by the climate crisis and crossed by conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East.
The famous awards (medicine, physics, chemistry, literature, peace, economics) are presented between October 7 and 14 in Stockholm and Oslo this year.
Highlight of the week, the Nobel Peace Prize, which was awarded on October 11, has never been so difficult to predict, as disasters multiply on the planet.
Dan Smith, director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri), favors a “white year”. Therefore, do not award the prize, as has been the case 19 times in its more than century-old history, the last time in 1972, in the middle of the Vietnam War.
“Maybe it’s time to say, ‘Yes, a lot of people are working very hard, but to no avail and more people and world leaders need to wake up and realize that we are in an extremely dangerous situation.'” he believes. “We now have more than 50 armed conflicts across the world. The lethality of these armed conflicts has increased significantly over the past two decades”he adds.
But in Oslo, such a prospect, experienced as an acknowledgment of failure, seems excluded.
“A candidate worthy of the prize”
“I am convinced that there will once again be a worthy candidate for the peace prize this year”says the secretary of the Nobel committee, Olav Njølstad.
This year, 286 nominations were submitted, although the names are kept under seal for 50 years.
In 2023, the Nobel Peace Prize went to Iranian women’s rights activist Narges Mohammadi, imprisoned in her country.
If experts are tearing their hair out to predict a winner this year, many of the – rare – candidacies announced publicly relate to the Middle East, reflecting current events. “When we see current world politics…”, constate Olav Njølstad.
The UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) and the Palestinian rights organizations Al-Haq and Israeli B’Tselem were thus proposed, without this necessarily making them favorites.
Faced with the existential risk that weapons systems capable of operating autonomously without human control represent for Humanity, several Nobel Prize experts also cite the coalition of non-governmental organizations Stop Killer Robots as a possible winner.
Nobel Peace Prize Nobel Prize
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