The world’s most prestigious prize is awarded each year for efforts towards world peace. But figuring out who gets it? That’s cause for strife.
Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado presented U.S. President Donald Trump with her framed 2025 Nobel Peace Prize medal in the Oval Office, 15 January 2026. (Photo: The White House)
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U.S. President Donald Trump is a “spectre in the room” haunting the Norwegian committee that awards the Nobel Peace Prize, perhaps nudging it to name an uncontroversial laureate on 9 October after a turbulent year.
The secretive five-member Norwegian Nobel Committee is widely expected to play it safe in 2026, perhaps by picking a humanitarian organisation. Last year, Trump reacted angrily after he failed to win despite, in his own telling, ending eight wars. The prize went instead to Venezuelan opposition politician María Corina Machado.
“Maybe they’re seeking a less controversial situation this year,” Haakon Gjerløw, acting director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo, said of the secretive committee’s dilemma. Fighting a war with Iran, Trump has scant chance of winning this year yet will be felt as “a spectre in the room” at committee meetings, he said.
The panel is likely to fear that Trump, if he dislikes and denounces the 2026 laureate, would do more harm to their peace cause than the good bestowed by the Nobel Prize, Gjerløw told a group of foreign reporters in Oslo. So a non-controversial laureate could be the best solution, even if the headline writers around the world find it dull.
This year there are 287 nominees for the peace prize first awarded in 1901 — 208 individuals and 79 organisations. The prize, worth 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.1 million) and widely viewed as the most prestigious accolade, can be shared by up to three laureates. The list of candidates is secret for 50 years.
Honoring peace making
The Peace Prize is part of a family of awards — for peace, physics, chemistry, medicine and literature — set up by Alfred Nobel, the Swedish philanthropist and inventor of dynamite. The Swedish central bank also issues an economics prize in memory of Nobel.
Gjerløw’s suggestions for the Peace Prize this year include Save the Children, which says more than 200 million children in 133 nations need humanitarian help this year, and Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms, community-led groups that provide food and other emergency aid to civilians amid a civil war that has killed at least 150,000 people in the African nation.
Betting sites also list the International Court of Justice (ICJ), Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Mykola Kuleba, founder and head of Save Ukraine, Pope Leo XIV — perhaps partly for his calls for regulation of artificial intelligence — and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, for standing up to Trump.
Media groups such as the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders also figure.
And there is no shortage of conflicts in need of peaceful resolution. The Peace Research Institute counted 65 active armed conflicts across 35 nations in 2025, the most since records began just after World War Two.
Conflicts over a peace prize
Last year’s winner Machado gave her gold Nobel medal to Trump in January, praising his commitment to freedom after U.S. forces captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.
She got little in return. Trump dismissed her as “not respected” in Venezuela and her decision to give away the medal was widely viewed in Norway as an embarrassment for the committee, which is appointed by Norway’s parliament.
“I think that this year they will go for a non-controversial prize,” echoed Asle Sveen, a historian of the prize. “People frequently ask me, ‘Is there a possibility for Donald Trump to get the Peace Prize this year?’ And I say, ‘Absolutely not’,” he said.
He said Trump had exaggerated his role in peace-making in his 2025 campaign for the prize and “it’s hard to get the peace prize when you have started a catastrophic war in the Middle East.”
After losing out in 2025, Trump sent a menacing message to Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre: “Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace,” he wrote, and reiterated threats to take over Greenland.
Playing it safe
And almost any candidate can stir controversial headlines. A play-it-safe prize to Save the Children, for instance, might be seen as criticising cuts in overseas aid by the United States and other rich nations.
Historians, peace experts and betting markets are frequently wrong in their predictions. It’s also possible that the committee could decide to be bold and court headlines rather than shy away.
Norway, with 5.7 million inhabitants, has long supported an international order led by the United Nations to guarantee the rights of small countries, rather than a world where major powers such as the United States, China and Russia do as they please. Twelve peace prizes have gone to United Nations and related organisations — most recently the World Food Programme in 2020.
Among candidates tipped for the 2026 peace prize as defenders of a fraying world order are the ICJ, which settles legal disputes between states and has ruled, for instance, that states have obligations to fight climate change.
Another is the International Criminal Court (ICC), which says it prosecutes individuals for “genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and aggression”. It would take a brave Nobel Committee to honour the ICC.
Justice and peace
The United States, which is not a party to the ICC, is campaigning to dismantle that court, denouncing it as a threat to U.S. sovereignty. And the ICC has issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for suspected war crimes in Gaza, and Russian President Vladimir Putin for alleged abductions of children during his war in Ukraine.
“U.S. foreign policy under Trump has undermined the stability of the post-war era,” said Nobel historian Øivind Stenersen, who favours a joint prize to the ICJ and the ICC. “Both courts are significant parts of the international legal infrastructure, aiming to consolidate and promote the international rule of law.”
Among extra reasons for the Nobel panel to avoid headlines this year, police in Norway are investigating a former leader of the committee, Thorbjørn Jagland, who had ties with convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Jagland is suspected of corruption for receiving gifts including flights and vacations. He denies wrongdoing, but the case means an unfavourable spotlight on the peace prize.
If you want to see the award live, tune in on Friday 9 October at 11:00 CET/05:00 EDT.
Questions to consider:
1. Why do you think there is so much controversy over the Nobel Peace Prize?
2. What do you think it means to promote peace?
3. How can a peace prize help to change the world for the better?
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.