Tomorrow at 12:00, the chairman of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, Britt Reiss-Andersen, will appear in front of the journalists in Norway, and will officially announce the name or names of the winners from among the names of the 343 individuals and organizations submitted to the committee.
The big question is whether the committee will use the opportunity to send a message in light of the war in Ukraine or whether it will choose to turn to other areas such as the fight against climate change, or whether it will decide to forgo awarding the prize this year.
According to Alfred Nobel’s will, the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to those who have done “the best work for brotherhood between nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for holding peace congresses and their promotion”.
But this year’s announcement comes when a dark cloud overshadows these goals due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has also sparked a humanitarian crisis and a global crisis of hunger and price increases alongside threats of using nuclear weapons.
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The submission of nominations to the award committee was closed at the end of January, about three weeks before the Russian forces began the invasion and the heavy bombing, but the war may still provide the basis to identify the award recipients and send an unequivocal message in the direction of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
According to the Oslo Peace Research Institute, which provides annual forecasts ahead of the announcement, one of the leading candidates is Alexei Navalny, the most prominent and vocal opponent of the Putin regime, who has been imprisoned in a penal colony for more than a year and a half.
Despite this, last weekend he took advantage of a hearing in his trial to speak out against the war in Ukraine, and even published an article in the “Washington Post” in which he presented the vision for Russia after the Putin era.
Another name leading the betting exchange is that of Svetlana Tikhonovskaya, the leader of the opposition in Belarus, who is considered the real winner in the 2020 elections against President Alexander Lukashenko. “A joint prize for both will be a clear protest against Russian aggression and the aid of Belarus, and support for democratic and non-violent alternatives,” the institute said.
If Navalny does win, it will be the second year in a row that a prominent opponent of Putin has won the award. Dmitry Mortov, the editor of the independent daily “Novaya Gazeta”, received the award last year together with the veteran journalist from the Philippines Maria Ressa. However, since then Mortov has been forced to stop the activities of the newspaper, which also lost its license last month, against the background of the tightening of control over the Russian media due to the war.
Apart from the opponents of the regime, the Peace Research Institute estimated that the committee might also give the award to organizations that work to help the victims of the war, such as the United Nations Refugee Agency, the Red Cross or the United Nations Children’s Agency UNICEF. The International Criminal Court, which is currently investigating suspected war crimes, may also be a leading candidate.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was not among the names submitted to the committee by the deadline, but the five members can add him to the list.
Mykhailo Podoliak, a senior adviser at the presidential office, told Reuters that Zelenskiy’s victory would be an award “for the entire Ukrainian people, who are currently paying the highest price for the right to live without war.”
At the same time, the committee may actually choose a different path and direct the spotlight towards other crises, chief among them the fight against global warming. The names that are mentioned are that of the young Swedish activist Greta Tonberry, the presenter and veteran British environmental activist Sir David Attenborough, and Tuvalu’s Foreign Minister Simon Coffey, who gave a speech at the climate conference in Glasgow last year with his feet in the water, to highlight the danger to island nations due to rising sea levels.
Another possibility – faint, but not without precedent – is that Rhys-Andersen will announce that the committee has decided not to award the prestigious prize this year, for the first time in 50 years, since in its opinion there is no suitable winner in view of the events of the year.
“Some people think that not giving the award at all would be the clearest statement about the state of world affairs,” explained Prof. Peter Wallenstein, a Swedish expert on international issues, in a conversation with Agence France-Presse.