Promoting peace through a prize

Each year a committee of Norwegians awards the Nobel Peace Prize to someone who has fought for peace. Is Donald Trump worthy?

U.S. President Donald Trump has said he has solved seven “unendable wars” this year alone and deserves the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize. He’s likely to be disappointed when the winner is announced in Oslo on 10 October.

“Zero. Absolutely no chance,” Oivind Stenersen, a Norwegian historian of the prize, told News Decoder when asked to rate Trump’s chances of clinching what is often called the world’s most prestigious award, decided by a committee of five Norwegians. 

“I would faint” if proven wrong, he added.

Trump’s steep tariffs on imports, cuts in U.S. public services and aid to poor nations, belittling of world leaders at the United Nations by saying “your countries are all going to hell” and his decision to quit the 2015 Paris climate agreement are sharply at odds with Norwegian policies.

And Trump’s threats to take control of Greenland — part of Norway’s Scandinavian neighbour Denmark – stoked alarm in Norway, a nation of 5.5 million people who share an Arctic border with Russia and fear a world dominated by big, expansionist powers.

“I wouldn’t bet money” on Trump, Nina Græger, director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo, also told News Decoder, saying his policies collided with Norwegian backing for liberal democracy and a rules-based international order in which all nations have a voice. “It would send a very peculiar signal if the Nobel committee awarded him the prize.”

Trump, the Middle East and Ukraine

A surprise breakthrough in Trump’s peace efforts in the Middle East or Ukraine — however remote that may now seem — might raise his chances in future years, she said. Norway is a strong backer of Ukraine’s efforts to defeat Russia’s invasion and last year recognised Palestinian statehood, despite opposition by the White House and Israel.

By contrast, Trump often says he deserves the Peace Prize. Apart from global prestige, the annual prize, first awarded in 1901, comprises a gold medal, a diploma and a cheque for $1 million.

“I have solved seven unendable wars,” he told the UN General Assembly last month, saying his work has saved millions of lives. “Everyone says that I should get the Nobel Peace Prize.” 

The conflicts include between Armenia and Azerbaijan, India and Pakistan, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo and Cambodia and Thailand. Some of the nations have praised Trump´s involvement and nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize, but some of the deals are fragile, or disputed. India, for instance, said a ceasefire with Pakistan was achieved by the two nations alone.

Trump also often expresses doubts that the committee will give him the Nobel Prize. Not winning, however, would be “a big insult to our country, I will tell you that. I don’t want it, I want the country to get it,” he told U.S. military leaders in September.

On par with Mandela?

Over the years, the prize has honoured leaders including South Africa’s Nelson Mandela for ending apartheid in South Africa, Martin Luther King, Jr. for his non-violent civil rights campaign in the United States, Mother Teresa for her humanitarian work with the poor and the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists.

Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, called Trump the “single finest” Nobel candidate in the history of the prize. The Norwegian Nobel Committee, appointed by parliament, is meant to be independent of politics.

The award was set up in the 1895 will of Alfred Nobel, a Swedish industrialist and the inventor of dynamite. 

Nobel’s will is vaguely worded, merely saying the peace prize should honour “the person who has done the most or best to advance fellowship among nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies and the establishment and promotion of peace congresses.”

The prize is part of a family of annual awards for peace, physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and economics. Members of national parliaments and thousands of other people, including many university professors, can make nominations to the peace prize.

This year there are 338 candidates for the peace prize — 244 individuals and 94 organisations. 

Giving peace a chance

Peace awards often go to little-known figures, handing them a symbolic megaphone. Last year´s peace prize went to Nihon Hidankyō, survivors of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 who campaign for an end to nuclear weapons.

The youngest winner of the Nobel was Pakistan’s Malala Yousafzai for her campaign for the rights of every child to get an education. She was 17 when she won in 2014, after recovering from a bullet to the head by a would-be Taliban assassin.

So if Trump won’t win in 2025, who will? 

Peace researcher Græger’s suggestions for the 2025 prize include the Committee to Protect Journalists, a U.S.-based watchdog that promotes the right to report safely, without fear of reprisals. She said a record 124 media workers were killed in 2024, with almost 70% in the Israel-Gaza war. 

She also favours Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms, a grassroots network of thousands of people who provide food, water, healthcare and other vital services for victims of the nation’s civil war. The conflict began in 2023 and has killed at least an estimated 150,000 people and forced almost 13 million people from their homes.

Could an international court of justice win?

Græger suggests that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) or the International Criminal Court (ICC) could win. The United States does not recognise either of the Courts, based in the Netherlands.

This year the ICJ issued a landmark opinion — inspired by a group of law students studying in Pacific island nations — that said nations have legally binding obligations to prevent climate change. Trump dismisses global warming as a “con job” despite scientific proofs that human activities, led by the burning of fossil fuels, are pushing up global temperatures and causing more heatwaves, droughts, floods and rising sea levels.

And the ICC has indicted Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, as well as figures from the Hamas militant group, for alleged crimes committed during the Gaza war.

Stenersen, the historian, said that the prize might help bolster the United Nations, perhaps to Secretary-General António Guterres and a UN agency, as a rebuke to Trump’s isolationism. The prize can be split up to three ways. 

One betting website places Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms as favourite, followed by Trump, ahead of Yulia Navalnaya — the widow of Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who died in prison in Siberia in 2024. Fourth on the list is Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. 

Hinting at the winner

Members of the committee sometimes drop hints about their thinking. This year the runes are not good for Trump.

Campaigns “have a rather more negative effect than a positive one. Because we talk about it on the committee. Some candidates push for it really hard and we do not like it,” Asle Toje said recently. He said his remarks were general, not about any specific candidate, but seem a veiled rebuttal to Trump’s lobbying.

More bluntly, another committee member Kristin Clemet, wrote an article for a Norwegian newspaper this year accusing Trump of “dismantling American democracy.” 

And the Facebook page of Gry Larsen, another member of the committee, includes a 2020 photo of her wearing a red hat emblazoned “Make Human Rights Great Again,” an apparent jab at similar pro-Trump caps emblazoned “Make America Great Again.”

Four American presidents have won the Nobel Peace Prize — most recently Barack Obama in 2009 months after he took office for what the committee called his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” That prize has often been criticised as premature. 

Jimmy Carter won in 2002 for work for peace and human rights, and Woodrow Wilson in 1919 for helping to found the League of Nations after the First World War. All were Democrats. Theodore Roosevelt, who helped end a war between Russia and Japan, is the only Republican president to have won — in 1906.

Questions to consider: 

1. Why does Donald Trump believe he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize?

2. The prize was first awarded in 1901. If it had been around earlier, who might have won?

3. Who do you think is deserving of a Nobel Peace Prize and why?

Alister Doyle is a British freelance writer based in Oslo who worked with Reuters for more than three decades, including as the company’s first environment correspondent from 2004-19. He has worked in more than 50 nations, mostly in Europe and Latin America, and spent a year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on a Knight Science Journalism fellowship from 2011-12. Among other stories, he landed with British scientists in a small plane on an Antarctic ice shelf in 2009 — weeks before it cracked up into the ocean.