Nobel's noble intentions have been watered down over time

 

Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado leaves the White House following a meeting with US President Donald Trump in Washington, DC, on January 15, 2026. [AFP]

The Nobel Peace Prize is one of the most prestigious global honours, awarded to individuals and organisations “who have done the most or best to advance peace”, according to Alfred Nobel’s will. Yet over its more than a century of existence, a number of laureates have sparked profound controversy over their subsequent political decisions in contexts where serious violence and human-rights abuses occurred. This leads to the question: Is the Nobel Prize perhaps, in the modern day, a tool to sanitise Western leaders and provide them with carte blanche to decimate less wanted populations?

The pattern began in 1973, when the prize was awarded to US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and North Vietnamese negotiator Le Duc Tho for their roles in negotiating a cease-fire in the Vietnam War. Tho declined the prize, citing the absence of lasting peace. However, even the awarding of Tho in the first place was suspicious, considering the entire reasoning behind the war was to move leadership towards the more capitalist North, while the South in the end won the war. And what was Kissinger’s role in this conflict anyway, aside from being touted as peacemaker after an embarrassing loss for the Americans?

Kissinger, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, is noted to have had significant involvement in decisions that contributed to widespread civilian suffering, including US bombing campaigns during the war, and covert expansion of the war into Cambodia and Laos.

In recent years, the Nobel Prize has stopped acting retroactively to clean up the images of war criminals but now seeks to sanitise images ahead of crimes committed. Two examples here of national leaders show this glaringly. Aung San Suu Kyi won the Prize in 1991 for her non-violent struggle for democracy. However, her legacy became deeply controversial after she became Myanmar’s de facto leader and failed to act decisively to stop atrocities committed by the Myanmar military against the Rohingya Muslim minority. The UN and human-rights organisations described the campaign against the Rohingya as ethnic cleansing, resulting in the death of thousands, and hundreds of thousands more fleeing the country.

When US President Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, a few months into his first term, the Nobel Committee cited his efforts to strengthen diplomacy and international cooperation. However, not long into his tenure, and all the way to the end of his second term, Obama was more than happy to prove the committee wrong, taking up the work of his predecessor, George W Bush, and expanding military engagements in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.

It is against the backdrop of these scenarios that we must now analyse the most recent Nobel Peace Prize win. In October 2025, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado was awarded the Prize for her “tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.” Machado is well known as a leader of the right-wing in her own country and has been one of the stalwart forces against the Bolivarian movement. This face of the opposition, rather than merely work to oust an incumbent, has been collaborating with the US to completely destabilise Venezuela and restore it to its capitalist history, thereby returning to Western companies monopoly over Venezuelan oil.

It would appear that the movement is successful as Maduro, a few months after Machado’s Nobel win, was illegally captured by the US. According to political pundits, Machado was a shoo-in as the leader that the West would install in Venezuela to protect their interests. Trump, however, expressed his lack of confidence in Machado as a leader. It is not surprising then, that a few days ago, Machado presented her Nobel Peace Prize medal to Trump as a symbolic gesture honouring his administration’s role in supporting Venezuelan democratic forces.

That the medal would be handed over in this way in order to curry favour shows that Arthur Nobel’s initial plans for this Prize have been eroded. What is left behind, instead, is a new legacy that shows us that we must be wary when political leaders are awarded the Nobel prize, as the imperialist Western plot is never too far away from these decisions.

Ms Njahira is an international lawyer