The Norwegian Nobel Committee each year awards the Nobel Peace Prize "to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses". As dictated by Nobel's will, the award is administered by the Norwegian Nobel Committee and awarded by a committee of five people elected by the Parliament of Norway. Each recipient receives a medal, a diploma, and a monetary award prize. It is one of the five prizes established by the 1895 will of Alfred Nobel, awarded for outstanding contributions in chemistry, physics, literature, peace, and physiology or medicine.
Overview
The Peace Prize is presented annually in Oslo, in the presence of the King of Norway, on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death, and is the only Nobel Prize not presented in Stockholm. Unlike the other prizes, the Peace Prize is occasionally awarded to an organisation rather than an individual. The Nobel Peace Prize was first awarded in 1901 to Frédéric Passy and Henry Dunant — who shared a Prize of 150,782 Swedish kronor — and, most recently, to Abiy Ahmed in 2019.
Linus Pauling, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate in 1962, is the only person to have been awarded two unshared Nobel Prizes; he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954.
At 17 years of age, Malala Yousafzai, the 2014 recipient, is the youngest to be awarded the Peace Prize.
The first woman to receive a Nobel Peace Prize was Bertha von Suttner in 1905. Of the 106 Nobel Peace Prize Laureates in history, 17 have been women.
The prize is considered the most controversial of the Nobel Prizes; with several of the selections having been criticised, and, on 19 occasions, no prize was awarded.
Despite having been nominated five times, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi never won the Prize. Following his assassination in 1948, the committee considered awarding it to him posthumously but decided against it — and, instead, withheld the Prize that year with the explanation that "there was no suitable living candidate."
In 1961, Dag Hammarskjöld, who died after his nomination but several months before the announcement, became the only laureate to be recognised posthumously; following this, the statutes were changed to render a future posthumous prize nearly impossible.
In 1973, Le Duc Tho declined the Prize, because "he was not in a position to accept the Prize, citing the situation in Vietnam as his reason."
Laureates
, the Peace Prize has been awarded to 106 individuals and 24 organizations. Seventeen women have won the Nobel Peace Prize, more than any other Nobel Prize. Only two recipients have won multiple Prizes: the International Committee of the Red Cross has won three times and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has won twice. There have been 19 years since its creation in which the Peace Prize was not awarded, more times than any other Nobel Prize. Lê Đức Thọ is the only person to refuse to accept a Nobel Peace Prize. He was jointly awarded the 1973 award with Henry Kissinger but declined the prize on grounds that such "bourgeois sentimentalities" were not for him] and that the Paris Peace Accords were not being adhered to in full.
