Will the Nobel Peace Prize this year serve as a condemnation of Vladimir Putin or a warning about the impending climate emergency? Or does it reveal another matter that the weightings failed to address?
With the Peace Prize, the Nobel Prize Week comes to an end on Friday in light of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.
In light of the Russian military operation in Ukraine, which propelled Europe into one of its gravest crises since World War II, the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize is announced in Oslo.
Without revealing any names, only the contestants’ numbers are known. This year, there were 343 candidates total, representing 251 people and 92 organisations.
The specialists who judge these awards must once again make do with supposition and conjecture.
Some believe that it will be challenging for the Nobel Committee to ignore this circumstance given that the war in Ukraine and its terrible effects have dominated international events since the commencement of the Russian incursion on February 24.
Henrik Urdahl, head of the Oslo Peace Research Institute, told radio NRK on Thursday that it was likely that the prize would somehow be related to Ukraine.
After learning about the attempted assassination of Alexei Navalny, who enraged the Kremlin and one of its few allies in the current war, the exiled Belarusian opposition named Svetlana Tikhanovskaya and the imprisoned Russian dissident.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, in honour of the millions of people who have been uprooted by the conflict, or the International Court of Justice in The Hague, which in March ordered an urgent halt to the Russian offensive, might potentially win the award.
The International Criminal Court, which has its headquarters in The Hague, as well as the investigative website Bellingcat are other sources that provide information on alleged war crimes in Ukraine.
The oddsmakers’ favourite, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, appears to have slim chances as long as the war’s residual dust is still around.
However, given the urgency of the crisis and the year’s catastrophic weather events, from this summer’s record-breaking heat wave in Europe to the disastrous floods in Pakistan, other award observers prefer to support the climate issue.
Despite her youth, the 19-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and her “Fridays for Future” movement, as well as the British naturalist David Attenborough, as well as other activists, have been among the names referenced for years in this sector.
The five members of the Nobel Committee could alternatively decide on a totally other topic, and they could also decide not to award the prize this year, as they have done 19 times in the past, most recently fifty years ago.
The scant hints provided by the committee’s head, however, suggest that the members selected one or two names, with the potential for three victors.
This year, the choice was “maybe more difficult,” Berit Rice-Andersen told NRK radio, adding, “We are confronting a severe security situation and we live in a world of tension.”
Maria Ressa and Dmitriy Muratov of Russia, two champions of journalistic freedom from the Philippines, received the Nobel Peace Prize the previous year.
The only one of these awards, the Nobel Peace Prize, is presented in Oslo; all the other awards are presented in Stockholm.
The Nobel season officially began this week with the awarding of the Medicine Prize to the Swedish scientist Svante Pappo for his contributions to deciphering the Neanderthal genome’s complete sequence and founding the field of paleogenetics, which looks to understand the characteristics of early human genes through the analysis of DNA found in ancient fossils.
Alain Aspe from France, John Clauser from America, and Anton Zeilinger from Austria received the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday in recognition of their groundbreaking work in the area of “quantum entanglement,” which is the phenomenon in which two quantum particles are completely interconnected, regardless of their physical separation.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded on Wednesday to Morten Meldahl, an American, Caroline Bertozzi, and Barry Sharpless for creating “click chemistry” and “orthogonal biochemistry,” two brand-new domains in modern chemistry.
The career of French novelist Anne Ernault and the “courage” of her autobiographical works, which gave her a feminist face, were recognised by the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday.
The Economics Prize, which was added to the five customary awards listed in Alfred Nobel’s will in 1969, brings the Nobel season to a close on Monday.
In the middle of the ongoing war in Europe, the Nobel Peace Prize is presented today.
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