The ‘optics of absence’ of deserving recipients from the global south is not a ledger of past mistakes; they are a map of risks the Nobel Peace Prize still runs when it tells the world what peace looks like.
Peace as Performance
On 10 October 2025, the Nobel committee in Oslo awarded the Peace Prize to María Corina Machado, praising her ‘tireless work’ for a democratic transition in Venezuela. Within hours, the familiar theatre unfurled: rapturous applause from admirers; a backlash pointing to her affinities with hard-right networks; and partisan jousting in Washington, where President Donald Trump’s circle accused the committee of picking ‘politics over peace.’ Machado’s award is not a departure so much as a reprise. The Peace Prize has long doubled as a mirror and a megaphone, reflecting prevailing global sensibilities while amplifying particular stories of conflict and reform. The question is not simply who the committee crowns, but what kind of peace the ceremony performs.
A few facts shape the stagecraft. Five members, appointed by Norway’s Storting (Parliament), choose the laureate; nominations and evaluations are sealed for fifty years. The selection spans months, with confidential expert reports commissioned and revised in rounds — a process that confers mystique and authority while locating judgment within a Northern polity with its own alliances and imaginaries.
Over a century, the committee’s remit has stretched from Alfred Nobel’s nineteenth-century phrasing ‘fraternity between nations,’ disarmament, peace congresses, toward human rights, democratisation, environmental protection, and even journalism, as a precondition for non-violent life (Sejersted, 2001). That elasticity has yielded landmark recognitions, including Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov receiving the prize in 2021 and Narges Mohammadi in 2023, and notorious misfires, such as Henry Kissinger being the recipient in 1973 and the European Union in 2012, each revealing how ‘peace’ is read through Euro-Atlantic common sense. The 2025 decision fits this pattern.
As historical sociology reminds us, canons universalise a local vernacular and call it common sense; the Nobel archive shows how that vernacular has long been Euro-Atlantic. To its credit, the Committee has sometimes stretched the category by including Bunche, Ossietzky, and Maathai, but the stretch is intermittent, and the recoil is strong.
While one reading celebrates non-violent civic courage in a repressive context, others note how quickly the frame shifted to a North-Atlantic spectacle of claims, counterclaims, and White House soundbites, risking the eclipse of Venezuelan agency and of the structural violences (sanctions, securitised transitions) that rarely make it into Oslo’s citation.
The Optics of Absence
Prizes canonise; they also exclude. There is no dearth of such instances, but perhaps no absence haunts the Peace Prize more than Mahatma Gandhi. He was shortlisted multiple times (1937, 1938, 1939, 1947, 1948) yet never honoured. After his assassination in January 1948, the committee considered a posthumous award but ultimately decided not to award a prize that year, citing the absence of a suitable living candidate. The official essay “Mahatma Gandhi, the missing laureate” has become the Committee’s own case study in misrecognition. Later leaders hinted at retrospective contrition, with the 1989 award to the Dalai Lama described as ‘in part a tribute’ to Gandhi (Tønnesson, 1999). The record shows anxiety about Gandhi’s ‘consistency’ as a pacifist and discomfort with the violence that surrounded partition; more deeply, it shows a committee struggling to read anticolonial mass politics within its own moral vocabulary.
Rules matter, but so do the ways they bend. Until 1974, posthumous awards were possible under narrow conditions; that is how Dag Hammarskjöld received the Peace Prize in 1961. Since 1974, prizes may go to someone who dies after the announcement, but not otherwise. The contrast is instructive: what proved impossible for Gandhi in 1948 proved permissible for a UN Secretary-General in 1961. This is glaring evidence that statutory interpretation travels with geopolitics and with the kinds of actors the Committee already knows how to recognise.
It also shows that absence is not an anecdote but a structure. In 1966 and 1967, the committee awarded no prize despite nominations for figures like U Thant, the Burmese Secretary-General of the United Nations. Internal dynamics, including personality, geopolitics, and Norwegian party balances, shaped the stalemate, as Geir Lundestad suggested (Lundestad, 2019). The archive is sparse on motive, but the pattern is clear: Global South leadership often fell outside the Committee’s comfort zone, especially when its work did not conform to Euro-Atlantic repertoires of juristic negotiation or statecraft.
The point is not procedural trivia; it is that legibility is political. What registers as ‘peace work’ has tended, historically, to be actors and repertoires legible to liberal internationalism: jurists, UN agencies, heroic dissidents, less often the messy, mass movements whose victories unsettle extractive orders (Lundestad, 2019). The exclusions were also racialised. Until 1950, every peace laureate was white and Euro-American; Ralph Bunche broke the line that year for his post-1948 Middle East mediation, an overdue recognition that nonetheless underlines how long the Committee mistook its own field of vision for the world.
The politics of absence is legible precisely where recognition happens. Rigoberta Menchú’s 1992 award centred on indigenous testimony against genocidal violence in Guatemala. When critics later challenged elements of her testimonio, Committee chair Francis Sejersted publicly affirmed that the prize stood, and that such disputes would not retroactively void the award.
The episode shows two things at once: how demands for testimonial purity are mobilised to discipline subaltern voices, and how the Committee refused to let that policing erase structural violence and the movements that exposed it. Exclusion, therefore, is not a footnote; it is constitutive. Modernity’s ‘connected histories’ are repeatedly flattened into stories of European self-authorship (Bhambra, 2007); Walter Mignolo and Aníbal Quijano remind us that institutions universalise particular knowledges while naming them neutral (Mignolo, 2009; Quijano, 2000). The Nobel stage is no exception.
There are, of course, moments when the Committee strained against its own optics. Carl von Ossietzky, recipient of the 1935 Peace prize, forced a confrontation with fascism; awarding a jailed anti-Nazi journalist enraged Hitler and permanently marked the Committee’s willingness to defy great-power rage. Decades later, Wangari Maathai, the first African woman to win the prize in 2004, made environmental justice legible as peace work, linking land, livelihoods and democracy in a way that widened the prize’s conceptual frame. These are not counter-examples so much as exceptions that prove the rule: boundary-bending choices that throw the default boundaries into relief.
Taken together, it outlines a canon of peace that has preferred legible protagonists (such as jurists, high officials, iconic dissidents) over less legible formations (mass anticolonial movements, land and labour struggles, community peace infrastructures) whose work does not always resolve into a single face or a familiar institutional grammar. As historical sociology reminds us, canons universalise a local vernacular and call it common sense; the Nobel archive shows how that vernacular has long been Euro-Atlantic. To its credit, the Committee has sometimes stretched the category by including Bunche, Ossietzky, and Maathai, but the stretch is intermittent, and the recoil is strong.
This is not bookkeeping; it is a prelude to the Prize’s contemporary dilemmas. When, as in 2025, the Committee honours a figure like María Corina Machado, admirers and critics alike are reacting not just to an individual but to a canon with long memories and longer blind spots. The question that needs to be asked is what happens when the Committee stretches ‘peace’ beyond disarmament and ceasefires to governance, media, and environmental infrastructure. That elasticity can enlarge recognition; it can also misplace costs, externalising sanctions, carcerality, or extractive harms as someone else’s problem. The ‘optics of absence’ are thus not a ledger of past mistakes; they are a map of risks the Prize still runs when it tells the world what peace looks like.
Performing the Future
Having traced what the Nobel Peace Committee fails to see, I now turn to what it chooses to count as peace. Over the past century, the category has migrated from disarmament and ceasefires into the terrains of governance, media, and environmental infrastructure. That migration is fruitful and fraught at once: fruitful because non-violent life rests on institutions and ecologies; fraught because the Prize can slide from recognising achieved reductions in harm to staging them, awarding potential in the hope it will harden into fact (Krebs, 2009).
There is no dearth of such references. US President Theodore Roosevelt, recipient of the 1906, was feted for mediating the Russo-Japanese War even as critics in Norway called him a ‘military-mad imperialist’ complicit in the subjugation of the Philippines, an early collision between peace-making and imperial police power (Kljajić, 2014). The 1973 award to the US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, and the Vietnamese revolutionary and politician, Le Duc Tho, remains the archetype: Thọ refused; two Norwegian committee members resigned; and internal norms were broken when unanimity was misrepresented.
A prize intended to symbolise ‘fraternity between nations’ consecrated an architect of covert wars. The committee’s own retrospective pages now catalogue the uproar. The catalytic instinct is clearest in the early twenty-first century. Barack Obama received the medal in the year 1999 not for completing peace-making but for a horizon: recommitting to nuclear restraint, restoring diplomacy, changing tone. Ronald Krebs (2009) called it the ‘false promise’ of the Nobel Peace Prize: the committee trying to make peace through acclaim, not merely recognising it. It was a wager that prestige can move policy. But prestige does not dissolve structure. When force authorisations persisted and drone warfare expanded, the Prize looked less like a judgment than a nudge; one that collided with the inertia of national security states.
The 2019 recipient, Abiy Ahmed, sharpened the dilemma. He was honoured for ending a frozen conflict; soon after, Ethiopia spiralled into devastating war. The Committee, unusually, reminded a sitting laureate of his ‘special responsibility’ to pursue peace, moral suasion after an accolade had already conferred global authority. The point is not to indict aspiration but to note the cost of premature canonisation: once the ceremony seals a narrative, revision becomes reputational triage rather than careful evaluation.
Elasticity has also blurred the distinction between peace and order. The European Union was awarded the Peace Prize in 2012 for making war between its members unthinkable; critics pointed to militarised borders, arms exports and austerity politics at the periphery. Even sympathetic readings treated the Prize as a morale boost for a project under strain. Here, the stretch ratified a governing architecture rather than a reduction in organised violence, revealing how easily ‘peace’ can become a euphemism for stability on particular terms.
But the broadened lens has sometimes clarified rather than muddied the category. The 2021 recipients, Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov, made explicit that freedom of expression is a precondition for any durable non-violent order; the 2023 recipient, Narges Mohammadi, foregrounded bodily autonomy and women’s rights as foundational to peace, not ornamental to it. These choices did not invent new meanings so much as name the scaffolding that stops violence from reproducing itself.
Set against that record, the 2025 recipient, María Corina Machado, sits at the fault line. One reading, reflected in the official citation and interviews, honours civilian courage under repression and a bid to secure electoral sovereignty. By contrast, a more critical view notes how quickly the narrative recentred the North-Atlantic stage. Claims and counterclaims about US strategy, sanctions, and regime-change optics soon took over, risking a story in which the costs borne by the vulnerable are treated as externalities to be tidied up after a ‘return to order’. The committee’s redefinition of peace from ceasefires to governance thus replays an old tension identified by decolonial and historical-sociological critiques: what is legible to Euro-Atlantic publics (elections secured, dissidents lionised, institutions refurbished) can eclipse the slower work that actually shrinks violence: demobilising militias, rolling back carcerality, protecting organisers outside capital cities, restoring land and livelihoods damaged by extractive projects. The problem is not ambition; it is misplacement — counting what is visible to us rather than what is vital to those who live with unpeace.
Recentering Peace: Toward an Ethics of Recognition
So, what would it mean to change the script rather than the cast? First, re-tether the prize to disarmament. Nobel’s will still matter. A practical step would be an impact audit five years post-award, a public report card on whether lethal force fell, rights expanded, and war-making capacities contracted in the laureate’s sphere. This won’t catch everything, but it would discipline the prize’s future-making impulses.
Second, to broaden the epistemic base, create a Global South advisory panel that includes union organisers, land defenders, peace women, and community leaders, whose assessments are published alongside the citation. This would practise what Mignolo terms ‘epistemic disobedience’: delinking evaluation from Euro-Atlantic common sense.
Third, temper leader-centrism; privilege movements. Delay leader awards until structural change is visible; foreground collectives transforming relations of extraction and punishment.
Fourth, loosen the secrecy. Keep sensitive names sealed, but declassify reasoning memos on a rolling twenty-year basis.
None of this purges politics from the Nobel Peace Prize. It acknowledges the politics already there and invites an ethics of recognition more answerable to those who live with unpeace. Machado’s medal will mean little if it reads as a Northern benediction on familiar scripts. It could mean much if it opens, rather than closes, the debate over what counts as peace and who gets to define it.
Image credit: “2024 Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony 03” by Jay Dixit, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.64452/serc7219
References:
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