Nobel Peace Prize Nominations

It’s not very significant, honestly. Getting nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize is quite a bit easier than you’d think.

According to the Nobel Foundation, here are the groups of people who can nominate someone (my numbering and summarization):

1. Members of national governments; elected or appointed (members of cabinets)
2. University professors of history, social sciences, law, philosophy, theology, and religion (the Humanities?); university directors
3. Directors of peace research institutes and foreign policy institutes
4. Members of The International Court of Justice in The Hague and The Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague; Members of L’Institut de Droit International; Members of the International Board of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom
5. Persons (or directors of organizations) who have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
6. Current and former members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee and former advisers to the Norwegian Nobel Committee

#1 and (especially) #2 are huge groups – hundreds of thousands of people fit into those two categories alone. Every possible political, ideological, and philosophical viewpoint would be represented by those groups.

(Also, for #3 – who defines validity here? Could I just invent my own “peace research institute” and name myself the director?)

You can nominate someone via a web form, apparently. Here it is – I didn’t go past the first screen, so I have no idea how extensive it is.

What’s really amazing is how few people actually get nominated. From the Nobel site:

The Norwegian Nobel Institute registered a total of 286 candidates for the 2024 peace prize, of which 197 are individuals and 89 are organisations. For comparison, the Nobel Institute received 351 valid nominations last year, distributed among 259 individuals and 92 organisations. The highest number ever was received in 2016, and was 376 candidates.

And here’s another interesting thing – the Nobel organization doesn’t publish the list of nominees until 50 years after the award is given. The nominees themselves aren’t even notified.

This means that most all of the time, saying someone was “nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize” means that the nominator announced it to the world, which might mean it was a PR stunt to begin with. The Nobel Foundation explicitly states this:

These advanced surmises are either the product of sheer speculation or information released by the person or persons behind the nomination.

So if you have some political figure you like, and you are one of the hundreds of thousands of people who can nominate someone, you can do so, then write a press release about it.

Additionally, your nomination might even be rejected by the committee (I have no idea if they even do this; but if you just wrote “this guy is a cool bro” on the application, you’d think they’d take issue…), and since they don’t release the list of nominees, no one would ever know. Since you “nominated” them, they could claim this – no one is tracking if the nomination was somehow reviewed for validity.

So, to simply be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize means very, very little.

Consider: Adolf Hitler was nominated in 1939. Here’s the record, along with this note:

The nomination was withdrawn 1 February 1939 by nominator E.G.C. Brandt, an anti-fascist member of the Swedish parliament who never intended his submission to be taken seriously.

Here’s the nomination letter, in its entirety.