By Jonathan Michael Feldman, October 12, 2025

Photo: By Nobel Peace Prize award announcement, September 25, 2025

“The great error of nearly all studies of war, an error in which all socialists have failed, has been to consider war as an episode in foreign politics, when it is especially an act of interior politics, and the most atrocious act of all” (Weil, 1945: 3).

What is the Social Construction of Moral Authority?

How should we frame the moral authority of a peace prize? The Nobel Peace Prize claims the highest moral authority in international life, yet its record reveals a consistent pattern of avoiding direct confrontation with the military-industrial structures of major Western powers. Philip Noel-Baker’s 1959 award for lifelong disarmament advocacy—centered on dismantling the arms industry and confronting the structural causes of war—marks the last time the Committee recognized a laureate whose work directly challenged the economic foundations of militarism (Alford, 2008; Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2025; Nobel Prize Outreach, 1959). An analysis of the Prize’s history through the lenses of institutional practice, critical security studies, and political economy demonstrates a systematic displacement of Alfred Nobel’s original disarmament mandate toward a ritualized form of liberal recognition. This evolution may function as a mechanism of symbolic pacification, validating a “safe” peace that leaves intact the core architectures of militarism found in ideology and material practices. This form of pacification operates not as a challenge to power but as a ritual of moral reassurance, allowing liberal institutions to perform virtue while avoiding structural confrontation.

An alternative approach would focus on the war-making institutions, how they mobilize if not colonize domestic populations and then create complementary and alternative institutions to help antiwar and anti-militarist forces accumulate power. Then, prizes would be awarded to individuals and organizations that supported such power accumulation aimed not just at the Global South, byproducts of militarism, and a particular brand of weapons, but also the larger war-making institutions and society (Feldman, 2007; Melman, 1988; Raskin, 1971; Weil, 1945).  Sarrica & Rizzoli (2023) have discussed the Nobel Peace prize as a socially constructed discourse.

Institutional Drift and the Containment of Disarmament

The Nobel Committee has progressively broadened its criteria to favor human-rights and democracy advocacy, a shift Tønnesson (2001) interprets as an adaptation to changing legitimacy pressures. This liberal expansion, however, has entailed the systematic marginalization of Nobel’s explicit injunction to reward work for the “abolition or reduction of standing armies.” While the Committee’s selections form a spectrum rather than a simple binary, they cluster around two poles: awards honoring mediation and rights work compatible with existing security frameworks, and awards that would directly challenge the political economy of deterrence or the military-industrial complex itself. The Committee’s selection pattern demonstrates a strong tendency toward the former.

Even disarmament-related awards exhibit notable constraints. The International Campaign to Ban Landmines (1997) and the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (2017) both targeted already-stigmatized weapon classes. Joseph Rotblat and the Pugwash Conferences (1995) advocated nuclear disarmament but within the framework of international scientific dialogue rather than economic restructuring. Eisaku Satō (1974) received recognition for Japan’s three non-nuclear principles, a significant stance but one that left conventional military structures untouched. Significant though these awards were, none mounted a sustained challenge to the conventional war-fighting capacity or economic foundations of major Western powers. This absence appears systematic rather than incidental—the pattern is consistent with a deeper institutional aversion to recognizing peace work that implicates Western economic and security paradigms.

A truly disruptive award would recognize efforts focused on the industrial conversion of military production to civilian purposes, a concept central to Seymour Melman’s work on the “permanent war economy.” Such recognition would directly challenge the economic foundations of militarism, yet the Committee has consistently avoided honoring this form of systemic advocacy.

No recent laureate has explicitly centered their work on dismantling U.S. or European military-industrial systems or called for industrial conversion from military to civilian production—a pattern that continues with the 2025 award to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, whose work focuses on domestic democratic resistance (Nobel Prize Outreach, 2025). While Machado’s full record merits closer examination as historical distance permits clearer analysis, the preliminary assessment suggests continuity with the Committee’s recent trajectory.

Historical exceptions illuminate the subsequent retreat. Philip Noel-Baker, awarded in 1959 for lifelong advocacy of comprehensive disarmament (Nobel Prize Outreach, 1959), represents the last laureate to pursue systemic challenges to military establishments. The 1980s awards to Alva Myrdal (1982) and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (1985) marked partial returns to disarmament themes during heightened Cold War tensions, yet even these remained focused on nuclear weapons within existing strategic frameworks rather than advocating wholesale economic demilitarization. Mikhail Gorbachev’s 1990 award recognized genuine arms reductions and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, yet came after the political defeat of Soviet militarism rather than rewarding advocacy that challenged militarism at its economic roots.

Beyond the awarded laureates, the pattern of avoidance is further illustrated by those consistently overlooked. The Committee has never recognized lifelong anti-war organizers who built movements directly opposing U.S. wars, such as Noam Chomsky. Similarly, whistleblowers like Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden, who exposed the inner workings of the military and intelligence apparatus, have never been serious contenders, despite their profound impact on public understanding of militarism.

This systematic exclusion has analytical consequences for the nuclear disarmament focus the Committee does reward. By centering advocacy for arms reduction while overlooking critics of the military interventions that drive proliferation, the Nobel framework treats nuclear weapons as a discrete problem rather than a symptom of hegemonic security structures. States observing the fates of disarmed regimes in Iraq and Libya rationally conclude that nuclear capability ensures survival against Western intervention—a dynamic that renders disarmament advocacy structurally incomplete without accompanying critique of the interventions that make deterrence strategically necessary (Chomsky, 2015). The Committee’s willingness to recognize nuclear abolitionists while avoiding those who challenge the conventional military policies underpinning proliferation incentives reveals the ideological boundaries of “acceptable” peace advocacy: the prize can address the instruments of potential annihilation but not the security doctrines that make states cling to them (Chomsky, 2015; see also Chomsky, 2016).

The Political Economy of “Safe” Peace

Seymour Melman’s analysis of the permanent war economy provides crucial insight into this institutional drift. In Pentagon Capitalism (1970) and The Permanent War Economy (1974), Melman demonstrated how defense industries, government procurement systems, and regional labor dependencies create a self-reinforcing economic order in which disarmament threatens jobs, profits, and political stability. In this schema, peace becomes economically disruptive, and the Nobel Prize—despite its symbolic capital—becomes structurally disincentivized from honoring such disruption. Within such an order, truly systemic peace advocacy becomes politically dangerous and economically costly.

In The Demilitarized Society (1988), Melman showed how true demilitarization (necessary for authentic peace) involved diverse elements including economic conversion, formal disarmament treaties and associated planning, and by extension an alternative security regime and alternative budgetary planning. Gregory Bischak’s edited volume further develops this framework by assembling essays that examine the institutional and economic foundations of a peace economy, emphasizing the need for democratic science policy, coalition-building for conversion, and a reorientation of national priorities away from militarized industrial policy (Bischak, 1991).

The Nobel Committee operates inside a structure of constraint. Awards that call for total demobilization or industrial conversion would challenge not merely national policies but the transnational circuits of capital, employment, and technology that sustain NATO-aligned economies. Consequently, the Committee’s tendency toward human-rights or diplomatic awards is consistent with a pattern in which those focusing on the larger economic and political structures sustaining the military economy and promoting war are ignored. A prize that genuinely rewarded campaigns for conversion—retraining defense workers, repurposing military plants, or legislating budgetary demilitarization—would confront the very system that currently underwrites a significant part of Western hegemony.

This logic of accommodation extends to the university system itself, where research agendas, funding streams, and institutional partnerships are increasingly shaped by military priorities. Universities become not only sites of knowledge production but nodes in the war economy—training engineers for weapons labs, hosting classified research, and legitimizing militarized innovation under the guise of “dual-use” science. The Nobel Prize becomes a yardstick for the intelligentsia’s moral borders, but these borders are not a comprehensive threat to expanding militarist frontiers.

Ideas of economic determinism, while powerful, do not fully explain the Committee’s evolution. This project furthers and builds upon the constructivist literature on international relations, which posits that state preferences emerge from social construction and that state interests are evolving rather than fixed (Alford, 2008: 64). Yet invoking determinism as a foil risks constructing a straw man. The more pressing question is whether the Committee’s decisions consistently reflect the preferences of entrenched institutions, networks, and alliances—actors that remain indifferent, if not actively hostile, to critiques of Western and Northern militarism.

Three additional factors warrant consideration. First, measuring the success of disarmament advocacy proves vastly more difficult than documenting human rights violations or mediation outcomes, potentially influencing the Committee toward more verifiable achievements.

Second, peace studies scholarship has itself evolved toward “positive peace” frameworks emphasizing justice, democracy, and human rights alongside the “negative peace” of mere absence of war—a shift the Committee may be tracking rather than resisting. This framework can easily be decoupled from the militarism embedded in one’s own country.

Third, the post-1960 period saw relatively few well-organized, sustained advocacy campaigns for Western military-industrial conversion, limiting the pool of eligible candidates who could challenge militarism at its economic foundations. This tendency is related to how research grants focus on “what is possible,” even if what is presently possible fits largely within the parameters of the status quo.

Fourth, the entanglement of universities with defense industries—through research grants, classified projects, and talent pipelines—has normalized militarism within the very institutions that might otherwise generate systemic critique. This academic-military nexus narrows the intellectual space for imagining post-militarist futures. The Committee’s choices thus reflect both structural constraints and the genuine scarcity of systemic disarmament advocacy. Laureates have helped create dozens of new international norms, fostered state accession to new international laws and institutions and changed our understanding of what is required of civilized nations in the modern era (Alford, 2008: 63). The result is a prize architecture that privileges liberal reform over systemic transformation, reinforcing a hierarchy of acceptable peace narratives.

Aspirational Awarding and the Geopolitics of the Committee

Krebs (2009) observes that the Committee often rewards intentions rather than tangible disarmament outcomes. The 2009 award to Barack Obama epitomized this aspirational drift—endorsing a projected liberal posture even as his administration expanded a covert drone war that caused substantial civilian casualties (Gibson, 2021) and modernized the U.S. nuclear arsenal (Paltrow, 2017). The 2009 award to Barack Obama epitomizes what Krebs (2009) identifies as the Committee’s drift toward “aspirational awarding.” Utterances that formerly went unnoticed are now subject to media coverage and commentary. In this manner the prize is a powerful megaphone. Nearly all doors are opened once you have become a laureate (Alford, 2008: 62). This endorsement of a projected liberal posture occurred even as his administration expanded a covert drone war that caused substantial civilian casualties and presided over a massive, long-term investment in modernizing the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

Photo: Jens Stoltenberg’s 2022 memoir. Stoltenberg served as Norway’s Prime Minister (2005-2013) and NATO Secretary General (2014-2024), embodying the institutional overlap between Norwegian political leadership and NATO’s strategic apparatus that shapes the Committee’s geopolitical context.

This aspirational logic is inseparable from the Committee’s geopolitical position. As an organ appointed by the Norwegian Parliament, it operates within a founding NATO state. Heffermehl (2021) notes that this relationship generates a structural reluctance to honor figures who directly oppose NATO’s strategic framework. Yet this constraint requires nuance: the Committee has demonstrated capacity for geopolitical defiance, most notably with the 2010 award to Liu Xiaobo, which provoked severe Chinese retaliation and diplomatic crisis. This suggests the Committee can challenge major powers when human rights violations are sufficiently visible and politically legible within liberal frameworks. The award angered not only Beijing but also created Western discomfort given economic dependencies on China, yet the Committee proceeded nonetheless. This very example, however, illuminates the selectivity at work: Liu’s advocacy for liberal democracy aligned with Western normative preferences, whereas advocates for dismantling Western military-industrial systems receive no comparable recognition. The Committee’s willingness to antagonize Beijing while avoiding structural critique of NATO militarism reveals not absolute constraint but differential application of moral courage—defiance abroad, accommodation at home. This selectivity reveals a moral asymmetry: the Committee is more willing to confront authoritarian violence abroad than to interrogate the liberal militarisms embedded in its own geopolitical milieu.

The Nobel Committee’s closed deliberations prevent definitive causal claims about specific decisions. However, the empirical pattern itself is not in dispute: across decades of awards, no laureate has prominently advocated converting NATO-aligned military industries to civilian production, despite such advocacy existing in peace research institutes, labor movements, and European parliamentary factions throughout the Cold War and post-Cold War periods.

This systematic absence indicates structural filtering, whether through:

• Explicit political constraints on nominations
• Committee self-censorship regarding Western military economics
• Gatekeeping by nominators who internalized Cold War boundaries
• Practical difficulties validating “conversion advocacy” as peace work

The precise mechanism matters less than the pattern’s existence. Any of these explanations confirms that certain categories of peace advocacy remain institutionally illegible to the Nobel framework. The absence of Committee transparency does not undermine this claim—it simply means we must infer structural bias from outcomes rather than document it through process.

The absence of clear evidence regarding Committee deliberations limits definitive claims about NATO influence. The observable pattern—decades without awards to advocates of Western military-industrial conversion despite such advocacy existing in peace research institutes, labor movements, and even some European parliamentary factions—suggests structural filters operating at the nomination, evaluation, or selection stages. Whether these filters reflect explicit political pressure, internalized institutional caution, or the practical difficulties of identifying and validating conversion advocacy remains an open empirical question requiring access to Committee archives. Until such access is granted, scholars must rely on pattern recognition, institutional context, and the comparative absence of certain laureate profiles to infer structural bias.

The official Nobel Prize narrative acknowledges past controversies while systematically deflecting structural critique. In defending awards to statesmen like Theodore Roosevelt (1906), the official account argues that “the Nobel Committee made it clear that the Nobel Peace Prize was not to become an award for life-long impeccable behavior, but primarily for specific political or humanitarian actions” (Tønnesson, n.d.). This framing treats controversy as a sign of institutional courage rather than what the pattern suggests: a preference for accommodating power over challenging it. The defense of awarding prizes to “those exercising political responsibility” because they indicated “a step along this road”—even if “within the framework of the politically possible”—reveals the core problem. By celebrating awards that operate “within the framework of the politically possible,” the Committee institutionalizes a peace discourse that never questions who defines what is politically possible.

More importantly, what is possible occurs within the bounds of the status quo defined by elites, politicians, granting agencies, resource providers, NGOs working within structural parameters of these actors, etc. In contrast, if the Nobel Peace Prize provided seed capital to those with ideas about how to change things, through intellectual and organizational innovations, then one could begin to bypass gatekeepers. Instead, the Nobel Prize Committee appears to assess concrete actions already vetted by filtering mechanisms. Instead of rewarding “the art of the possible,” they are actually rewarding “the art of what elites make possible” or what established filtering systems make possible.

The 2009 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Barack Obama exemplifies this dynamic with striking clarity. Announced just eleven days into his presidency, the award was based not on concrete disarmament achievements but on the “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples” and the “p”romise” of a nuclear-free vision (NobelPrize.org, 2009; Wikipedia, 2009). In fact, Obama’s tenure saw the expansion of drone warfare and the modernization of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, reinforcing the very systems Nobel sought to dismantle (Factually, 2025). The Prize thus operated as a moral subsidy for liberal militarism, validating posture over transformation. A counterpoint often raised is the 2010 award to Liu Xiaobo, which provoked direct confrontation with the Chinese state. Yet this exception refines rather than refutes the pattern: the Committee appears more willing to challenge adversarial regimes than to honor systemic critiques of Western militarism or the NATO security framework to which Norway itself belongs (Wikipedia, 2010; NobelPrize.org, 2010). Institutional courage, in this case, has a geopolitical direction—it confronts official enemies but avoids internal reckoning.

The Roosevelt award is defended not despite his imperialism but because he performed symbolic gestures toward arbitration while maintaining U.S. military dominance. Similarly, the Ossietzky award (1936) is celebrated as proof of the Committee’s willingness to “interfere in national matters,” yet this interference was directed at fascist Germany—never at the military-industrial systems of Norway’s own NATO allies. The official narrative asks whether “social science and the humanities” scholars would be “stuck on the theoretical foundation of a peace prize” or asking “What is Peace?”—dismissing precisely the kind of systematic inquiry that might reveal how the Prize functions not as a challenge to militarism but as its moral subsidy. The account concludes by praising politicians’ ability to “put aside their conflicts and concentrate on their essential task—making decisions,” as if the content of those decisions—decades of systematic exclusion of anti-militarist advocacy—were irrelevant to evaluating the Prize’s fidelity to Nobel’s mandate.

This institutional preference for pragmatic statecraft creates a significant blind spot, systematically excluding figures who challenge the very architecture of Western militarism. The Committee’s framework has no place for the intellectual and moral courage of certain varieties of anti-war organizers who have spent decades deconstructing the ideological underpinnings of military intervention. By operating within a paradigm that venerates the “art of the possible,” the Committee inherently validates an elite-defined status quo, ensuring that the Prize rewards those who work within established power structures rather than those who pose a fundamental, systemic challenge to them. This approach is consistent with other trends like quantification of social sciences, focus on positivistic and empirical analysis of what exists rather than utopian explorations of the design of what could be, and remaining trapped in the logic of the existing order of things rather than investigating system transforming interventions.

Historical Memory and the Unconfronted Legacy of Industrialized Violence

The gap between Nobel’s mandate and the Committee’s practice becomes starker against the backdrop of twentieth-century total war, yet this comparison requires careful framing. When Alfred Nobel drafted his will in 1895, “standing armies” denoted conscript forces preparing for conventional territorial wars. Modern militarism encompasses nuclear deterrence, cybersecurity infrastructure, unmanned systems, private military contractors, and globally distributed supply chains—a security architecture Nobel could scarcely have imagined. The Committee thus faces a translation problem: how to apply nineteenth-century language to twenty-first-century realities.

Nevertheless, the core principle Nobel articulated—rewarding those who challenge organized state violence and military establishments—remains translatable across eras. The Allied bombing campaign against Japan in 1945 exemplifies the industrialized logic of modern militarism that demands such challenge. The firebombing of sixty-seven Japanese cities, culminating in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, demonstrated an industrial capacity for destruction that marked a qualitative shift in warfare.

The firebombing of Tokyo on March 9-10, 1945 exemplifies the industrialized logic of modern warfare that Nobel’s original mandate sought to confront. In what became the deadliest air raid of World War II, U.S. bombers killed an estimated 100,000 civilians and left over a million homeless—many of them incinerated in place due to the density of wooden housing and the absence of evacuation infrastructure. As Encyclopædia Britannica notes, the scale and intensity of the attack made it especially lethal for the poor and unhoused, who had no means of escape and no protection from the firestorm (Encyclopædia Britannica, 2025).

This event underscores how conventional militarism, not just nuclear weaponry, produces mass death through systemic targeting of vulnerable populations. By focusing on stigmatized weapon classes, the Committee allows the broader political economy of conventional militarism to remain unexamined. Even advocates like Desmond Tutu (1984), whose anti-apartheid work explicitly connected South African militarism to broader structures of violence, received recognition primarily for human rights advocacy rather than for challenging the economic foundations of military power. Tutu faulted Sweden for exporting weapons to his country. Tutu’s critique of arms exports anticipated concerns later articulated by South African activists, who argued in 2021 that post-apartheid weapons sales to Saudi Arabia made South Africa “complicit in war crimes in Yemen” (Mathe and Marchant, 2021). While this particular analysis appeared in opinion journalism rather than peer-reviewed scholarship, it reflects ongoing debates about how Tutu’s anti-militarist framework could extend beyond apartheid-era critique.

Conclusion: From Moral Authority to Symbolic Pacification

Through institutional drift, aspirational awarding tied to geopolitical constraints, and selective historical memory, the evidence suggests the Nobel Peace Prize has systematically departed from its founding mission to challenge standing armies, i.e. a state that is readied for war rather than systemic peace. The Prize’s selection pattern is consistent with operating more as moral validation for existing security frameworks than as an instrument of their transformation—rewarding those who mitigate the effects of militarism rather than those who confront its structural causes.

This conclusion requires three qualifications. First, the translation of Nobel’s 1895 vision into contemporary security contexts presents genuine conceptual challenges that may partially explain the Committee’s trajectory. Yet, if we think in terms of modes of military production and militarism, it is not hard to link how a specific set of technologies X in period 1 achieving power projection X1 could be translated into another set of technologies Y in period 2 achieving power projection Y1.

If Nobel’s 1895 will called for the abolition or reduction of standing armies, then today’s drone warfare represents a technological mutation of that very institution—one that preserves its strategic function while obscuring its political visibility. In the late 19th century, power projection relied on mass conscription, territorial garrisons, and visible troop deployments (X → X1). In the 21st century, it relies on remote-controlled platforms, algorithmic targeting, and transnational surveillance networks (Y → Y1). The shift from boots-on-the-ground to drones-in-the-sky does not dismantle the war-making apparatus—it reconfigures it. Yet the Nobel Committee has not recognized figures who challenge this transformation at its structural core. Instead, it rewards those who mitigate its effects through humanitarian aid or post-conflict reconciliation. A prize aligned with Nobel’s intent would honor those who expose the drone-industrial complex, advocate for algorithmic disarmament, or build alternative security regimes that reject automated violence as a tool of policy.

Second, the scarcity of organized advocacy for military-industrial conversion in the post-Cold War period has limited the available pool of candidates who could embody Nobel’s original vision. Yet by consistently awarding figures who avoid this agenda, the Committee compounds the problem—reinforcing a peace discourse that evades structural confrontation. The recognition for those who theorize comprehensive alternatives to militarism may be more important than the celebration of piecemeal reforms that leave the war economy intact. In failing to honor such systemic visionaries, the Committee not only narrows the horizon of peace politics but also legitimizes a fragmented moral economy that treats symptoms while preserving the underlying machinery of war.

Third, some awards—particularly those recognizing nuclear disarmament advocacy during the Cold War—did represent meaningful challenges to prevailing security doctrines, especially in moments of heightened geopolitical tension. Yet they stopped short of confronting the economic foundations of militarism and the broader architecture of war-making. Crucially, these recognitions begged a deeper question: how conventional weapons systems, military interventions, and strategic doctrines actively fuel nuclear proliferation rather than contain it. The fetishization of nuclear weapons—treating them as the apex threat while ignoring the systemic violence of conventional warfare—functions as a displacement mechanism that obscures the full spectrum of militarism. This displacement not only narrows the scope of peace advocacy but also legitimizes a bifurcated moral economy in which nuclear critique is permitted while conventional war remains structurally unchallenged.

Nevertheless, the dominant pattern remains clear. To recover its disarmament legitimacy, the Committee would need to re-embed its recognition in measurable challenges to organized violence: industrial conversion, demilitarization of economies, and concrete reductions in armament production. As Melman (1974) argued, a real peace economy demands not symbolic gestures but the reorganization of productive life itself. Such reorganization would also require confronting the militarization of higher education, redirecting public research away from weapons development and toward civilian resilience, ecological repair, and democratic infrastructure. Only by honoring such systemic efforts could the Nobel Peace Prize reclaim the radical intent of Alfred Nobel’s original vision. Absent this shift, the Prize risks becoming a commemorative echo of peace rather than its strategic instrument. The committee should avoid becoming a displacement mechanism for global militarism that leaves in place core war-making institutions and leaves the forces of military intervention and violations of basic human rights unchallenged.

To recover its disarmament legitimacy, the Nobel Committee must move beyond symbolic gestures and re-embed its recognition in concrete, material challenges to the capacity for organized violence. As Melman argued, a real peace economy demands the reorganization of productive life itself. The Prize must begin to honor those who advance this reorganization through industrial conversion, the demilitarization of economies, and verifiable reductions in armament production.

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Appendix: Typology of Nobel Peace Prize Laureates, 1945–2025

1945–1959
Representative Laureates: Cordell Hull (1945); Ralph Bunche (1950); Philip Noel-Baker (1959)

Classification: Compatible with existing frameworks, except Noel-Baker (systemic disarmament advocate)
Justification: Only Noel-Baker pursued comprehensive disarmament including economic conversion. Hull and Bunche represented diplomatic stabilization that preserved post-WWII security architectures without challenging the military-industrial foundations of major powers. Noel-Baker may be the exception that proves the rule.

1960s
Representative Laureates: Albert Luthuli (1960); UNICEF (1965); René Cassin (1968)

Classification: Compatible with existing frameworks
Justification: Anti-colonial, humanitarian, and human rights work advanced liberal norms but did not address military-industrial systems. Luthuli’s anti-apartheid work and UNICEF’s humanitarian aid, while crucial, operated without targeting the military-industrial structures sustaining Western power.

1970s
Representative Laureates: Willy Brandt (1971); Henry Kissinger & Lê Đức Thọ (1973); Eisaku Satō (1974); Amnesty International (1977); Mother Teresa (1979)

Classification: Compatible with existing frameworks; Satō represents partial disarmament (nuclear non-proliferation)
Justification: Emphasis on détente, human rights, and humanitarianism. Satō’s non-nuclear principles were limited to nuclear weapons while explicitly leaving Japan under the U.S. “nuclear umbrella” and its conventional military alliance intact, preserving rather than challenging the security architecture of Western hegemony.

1980s
Representative Laureates: Alva Myrdal (1982); Desmond Tutu (1984); IPPNW (1985); Óscar Arias Sánchez (1987)
Classification: Partial challenge to militarism (Myrdal, IPPNW); others compatible

Justification: Myrdal and IPPNW contested nuclear arms within Cold War strategic logic but not the economic bases of militarism. Tutu linked militarism to apartheid but was honored primarily for his “role as a unifying leader figure in the non-violent campaign to resolve the problem of apartheid,” not for challenging the broader Western militarism and arms exports that supported the apartheid regime.

1990s
Representative Laureates: Mikhail Gorbachev (1990); Aung San Suu Kyi (1991); Rigoberta Menchú (1992); Nelson Mandela & F.W. de Klerk (1993); Yasser Arafat/Shimon Peres/Yitzhak Rabin (1994); Joseph Rotblat & Pugwash (1995); International Campaign to Ban Landmines (1997)

Classification: Gorbachev represents post-facto disarmament recognition; Rotblat/Pugwash and ICBL represent partial challenges; others compatible
Justification: Gorbachev’s award followed the political defeat and systemic collapse of Soviet militarism rather than rewarding advocacy for transformation. Rotblat/Pugwash advanced nuclear disarmament through scientific dialogue without addressing economic conversion. ICBL successfully targeted a stigmatized weapon but did not challenge the core war-fighting capacity or arms industries of major NATO states. Peace process laureates remained within prevailing security paradigms. Remilitarization of Russia after Gorbachev highlights the problem of not rewarding Russians engaged in conversion and transformation of military-serving institutions more directly.

2000s
Representative Laureates: Shirin Ebadi (2003); Wangari Maathai (2004); Mohamed ElBaradei & IAEA (2005); Muhammad Yunus (2006); Al Gore & IPCC (2007); Martti Ahtisaari (2008); Barack Obama (2009)

Classification: Compatible with existing frameworks / aspirational
Justification: Work centered on human rights, environment, mediation, and sustainable development within liberal internationalism. The award to IAEA and ElBaradei for “efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for military purposes” represents non-proliferation—a framework that maintains the nuclear hierarchy and does not challenge the arsenals of established powers. Obama’s award was aspirational, granted amid ongoing drone warfare and nuclear arsenal modernization. No recognition was extended to critics of drone warfare or algorithmic militarism, despite their growing role in reshaping power projection and sustaining interventionist policy.

2010s
Representative Laureates: Liu Xiaobo (2010); Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Leymah Gbowee & Tawakkol Karman (2011); European Union (2012); OPCW (2013); Kailash Satyarthi & Malala Yousafzai (2014); Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet (2015); Juan Manuel Santos (2016); ICAN (2017); Denis Mukwege & Nadia Murad (2018); Abiy Ahmed (2019)

Classification: ICAN represents a partial challenge to nuclear militarism; OPCW addresses chemical weapons; others compatible
Justification: ICAN achieved a “treaty-based prohibition” of nuclear weapons, challenging nuclear powers but without addressing the conventional war economies or military-industrial conversion that drive global conflict. OPCW targeted already-delegitimized chemical arms. Other laureates emphasized democracy, rights, and reconciliation within liberal frameworks. The Committee continued to overlook actors confronting the drone-industrial complex or autonomous weapons systems—technologies that increasingly substitute for standing armies while preserving militarist logic.

2020s
Representative Laureates: World Food Programme (2020); Maria Ressa & Dmitry Muratov (2021); Ales Bialiatski, Memorial & Center for Civil Liberties (2022); Narges Mohammadi (2023); Nihon Hidankyo (2024); María Corina Machado (2025)

Classification: Nihon Hidankyo represents nuclear disarmament advocacy; others compatible
Justification: The decade reflects continued emphasis on humanitarian aid, press freedom, and civil resistance within liberal-democratic frameworks. Nihon Hidankyo (atomic bomb survivors) advocates nuclear abolition but not industrial conversion. The award to Machado for her “struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy” fits the pattern of recognizing liberal democratic opposition while overlooking her documented advocacy for U.S. military intervention and economic sanctions—positions that align with Western interventionist frameworks rather than Nobel’s injunction for “fraternity between nations” and the reduction of militarism. Despite the rise of AI-enabled targeting and remote warfare, no laureate has confronted the structural transformation of militarism in its digital and automated forms.

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Classification Criteria

This typology distinguishes between:

Systemic challenges: Confront the economic and institutional foundations of militarism, including advocacy for military-industrial conversion and comprehensive demilitarization.

Partial challenges: Target specific weapon systems or security doctrines (e.g., nuclear weapons, landmines) without addressing the underlying political economy of war or conventional military structures.

Compatible laureates: Operate comfortably within existing security frameworks, focusing on human rights, humanitarian aid, mediation, or democracy promotion without challenging the military-industrial order.

The spectrum acknowledges overlaps and gradations—few awards fully transcend the constraints of the prevailing military-industrial system, though some have expanded the moral and normative boundaries of what constitutes peace work.Retry

References

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Methodological Note: This essay employs pattern analysis to examine the Nobel Peace Prize’s institutional trajectory in the absence of access to Committee archives. The author acknowledges the use of AI tools in the drafting process.