[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. 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? 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. 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. It is against the backdrop of these scenarios that we must now analyse the most recent Nobel Peace Prize win.

Source: Standard Digital January 19, 2026 23:50 UTC