Nobel Peace Prize

Therefore, this year's peace prize should not be awarded

The world is more violent than ever

Niclas Vent

Reporter

This is a cultural article that is part of Aftonbladet's opinion journalism.

Published at 04.30

Tank 122 Leopard during the advance as the Södra Skånska Regiment P 7 has a combat display during the first battalion exercise since Sweden joined NATO, at the Revinge field outside Lund in March 2024. Photo: Johan Nilsson/TT

It's no secret that the Norwegian Nobel Committee has long dabbled just outside the fringes of Alfred Nobel's express will.

Nobel wanted to give his peace prize to the one "who has worked most or best for the fraternization of peoples and the abolition or reduction of standing armies and the formation and spread of peace congresses".

Generously expressed, a very broad interpretation of "the fraternization of peoples" has had to do the heavy lifting in the justifications in recent years.

You can say a lot about Iranian feminists, Belarusian democracy fighters and Malala Yousafzai - but they haven't exactly abolished standing armies.

In good times it would not have been a problem.

But while the Nobel Committee praised well-intentioned fringe phenomena, the world has instead steadily become a worse place:

• The 59 conflicts that took place in the world last year are more than in any year since Uppsala University began counting in 1946.
• World military spending rose last year for the ninth consecutive year, to a total of $2.443 billion. It is the highest figure ever estimated by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri). The world's states spent an average of 6.9 percent of their spending on the military last year. The increase is not isolated either, it repeats itself in all parts of the world.
• Apart from 1994 – the year of the genocide in Rwanda – 2021, 2022 and 2023 have been the three bloodiest years since the end of the Cold War.

My point, of course, is not to criticize the people who unequivocally make the world better.

But I also can't see the point of gala celebrating the best tail light fix while the whole car burns up.

Looking at at least the last 20 years, it becomes clear that today's world is not the result of the efforts of the Nobel laureates, but on the contrary of the crises we have collectively failed to solve.

Through no fault of their own, the row of award winners has turned into a sort of failure's cabinet of curiosities.

That all the lions today would be able to hiss sweetly with the lambs is perhaps utopian at the extreme, but along the road to our current hell there are many missed chances strewn about:

• The Putin regime's Russia should long ago have been forced to go in a different direction, or at least – more likely – dissuaded from starting a major war.
• A long-term peace between Israel and Palestine should have been forced, two secure states established and the occupation ended.
• The outside world should have done more to stop Ethiopia's civil war.
•  The war in Syria should not have been allowed to continue, year after bloody year.

While prize after prize has been awarded, reality has overtaken the prize. That is the sad truth.

You could say that it is therefore more important than ever to pay attention to those who actually do something good. I can sympathize with that stance.

But we can't keep firing saluting band-aids while the patient bleeds to death.

The world is headed in the wrong direction and it's time for the Nobel Committee to admit it, so that the rest of us can admit it to each other.

Therefore, there is only one reasonable thing to do this year:

Not to award the Peace Prize at all.

Affter all, it has happened before. During the two world wars, only two prizes were awarded, both times to the Red Cross. In 1914, 1915, 1916, 1918 and 1939–1943 no prizes were awarded at all.

Times are not so hard yet.

But the most important thing the Nobel Committee can do now is to send the signal that together we must immediately get off the road there.