Nobel Peace Prize
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The '''Nobel Peace Prize''' is one of five Nobel Prizes bequested by the Sweden|Swedish industrialist and inventor Alfred Nobel. Ironically, as some point out, Alfred Nobel was the man whose invention, dynamite, led to the death of thousands if not millions of people. According to the will of Alfred Nobel, the prize should be awarded "to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing army|armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses".
The Peace Prize is awarded annually in Oslo, the capital of Norway, unlike the prizes in Nobel Prize in Physics|physics, Nobel Prize in Chemistry|chemistry, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine|medicine and Nobel Prize in Literature|literature, which are awarded in Stockholm, Sweden. For the past decade, the Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony has been followed the next day by the Nobel Peace Prize Concert, which is broadcast to over 150 countries and more than 450 million households around the world. The Concert has received worldwide fame and the participation of top celebrity hosts and performers.
in Oslo, Norway.]]
The Norwegian Nobel Committee, whose members are chosen by the Stortinget|Norwegian Parliament, is appointed to select the laureate for the Peace Prize, and the prize is awarded by its chairman, currently Dr. Ole Danbolt Mjøs. At the time of Alfred Nobel's death Sweden and Norway were in a personal union in which the Swedish government was solely responsible for foreign policy, and the Stortinget|Norwegian Parliament was responsible for Norwegian domestic policy. While Alfred Nobel never told anybody http://www.nobel.no/eng_com_nor.htmlwhy he didn't give a Swedish body the task of awarding the Peace Prize, one of the suggested reasons has been to prevent the manipulation of the selection process by foreign powers. Other suggestions point to the fact that the Norwegian Assembly (Storting) was the first national legislature to vote support for the international peace movement and Nobel's admiration of Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, the Norwegian patriot and leading author at that time.
Nominations for the prize may be made by a broad array of prominent individuals, including former recipients, members of national assemblies, university professors, international judges, and special advisors to the prize committee. In some years as many as 199 nominations have been received. The nominations are kept secret by the committee which asks that nominators do the same. Over time many individuals have become known as "Nobel Peace Prize Nominees", but this designation has no official standing http://www.nobel.no/eng_com_nom.html Nominations from 1901 to 1951 have been released in a database. When the past nominations were released it was discovered that Adolf Hitler was once nominated in 1939, though the nomination was retracted in February of the same year.
Unlike the other Nobel Prizes, the Nobel Peace Prize may be awarded to persons or organizations that are in the process of resolving an issue, rather than upon the resolution of the issue. In this way, the Nobel Peace Prize differs from all the other Nobel prizes. Since the prize can be given to individuals involved in ongoing peace processes, some of the awards now appear, with hindsight, questionable, particularly when those processes failed to bear lasting fruit. For example, the awards given to Theodore Roosevelt, Yasser Arafat, Le Duc Tho, and Henry Kissinger were particularly controversial and criticized; the latter prompted two dissenting committee members to resign http://nobelprize.org/peace/articles/controversies/index.html The Nobel Committee has also received criticism from right-wing groups who see their decisions as guided by an apparent left-wing bias.
In 2005, the Nobel Peace Center opened, to present the laureates, conflicts, and work for peace around the world.
Laureates
List of Nobel Prize laureates in Peace from 1901 to the present day.
Controversy
The Nobel Peace Prize is controversial in numerous respects. The parliament of Norway is responsible for appointing the Peace Prize committee. The same parliament has pursued partisan military aims by ratifying membership in NATO in 1949, by hosting NATO troops, and by leasing ports and territorial waters to US ballistic missile submarines in 1983. By contrast Sweden, which awards the other Nobel Prizes, has remained neutral.
A particular claimed weakness of the Nobel Peace Prize awarding process is the swiftness of recognition. The scientific and literature Nobel prizes are usually issued in retrospective|retrospect, often two or three decades after the intellectual achievement, thus representing a time-proven confirmation and balance of approval by the established academic community, seldom contradicted by newer developments. In contrast, the Nobel Peace prize at times takes the form of summary judgment, being issued in the same year as or the year immediately following the political act. Some commentators have suggested that to award a peace prize on the basis of unquantifiable contemporary opinion is unjust or possibly erroneous. This situation may be said to deprive the 'real' peace makers, who may not be recognised for their long-term or subtle approaches. However, others have pointed to the uniqueness of the Peace prize in that its high profile can often focus world attention on particular problems and possibly aid in the peace-efforts themselves. When looked at more closely, the peace-laureates often have a lifetime's history of working at and promoting humanitarian issues, as in the examples of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., an African-American Christian civil rights activist (1964 laureate); Mother Teresa, a Catholic missionary nun (1979 laureate); and Aung San Suu Kyi, a Buddhist nonviolent pro-democracy activist (1991 laureate).
See also
International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War
Nobel Prize
Norwegian Nobel Committee
Sweden-Norway
Nobel Prize controversies
External links
http://www.nobel.no/index.htmlhttp://nobelprize.org/peace/nomination/database.htmlhttp://www.betterworldlinks.org/book07.htmBetter World Links
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