And there are a lot of those people.
So who are these qualified nominators, with the power to personally create an international news story with almost no effort, while gifting someone the shiny “Nobel nominee” title?
For starters
- Nobel Peace Prize laureates (including board members of awarded organisations)
- current and past members of the Nobel committee
- former advisors to the committee
- members of the international courts in the Hague
So far a pretty exclusive group.
It doesn't stop there though, the right to nominate is also afforded:
- university professors, professors emeriti and associate professors of history, social sciences, law, philosophy, theology, and religion
- university rectors and university directors (or their equivalents)
- directors of peace research institutes and foreign policy institutes
That widens the group significantly. If you're an associate professor in theology at a small town university and feel bored and unseen, know that you can very easily garner the attention of the British press by nominating, say, Boris Johnson or Jeremy Corbyn.
Or simply say that you do. Nominations are secret for 50 years, so the Nobel Committee won't share, confirm or dispute. So if you're too lazy to actually write the letter, don’t worry; just make the declaration. The bluff won’t be called for half a century, and in fact not even then, because no-one will care.
Not enough attention for you? Kanye West, Ivanka Trump, Hillary Rodham Clinton or any other sufficiently controversial US figure should do the trick, the utter irrelevance of the nomination immediately overshadowed by the story's potential to garner clicks. The story will be irresistible to most media outlets: a piece that takes mere minutes to write, is technically correct, and spreads fast and far.
You don't need any academic credentials to nominate though, the list of the qualified also includes:
- members of national assemblies
- members of national governments
- current heads of states.
That's right, any member of any parliament of any country. Most nations have national assemblies with hundreds of members, each endowed with their fair share of wingnuts, provocateurs, and dilettantes with a deep craving for attention.
So there you have it. Far too many people can, unilaterally and with almost no effort, make anyone a Nobel Peace Prize Nominee, for it to carry any significance at all.
The nominations were never supposed to be worth anything, the system intended simply to create a large enough pool of good suggestions for the committee, but with some restrictions ensuring there wouldn't be an overwhelming number of names to sort through.
A nomination by a notable nominator is genuinely newsworthy of course — if it’s Obama nominating Thunberg, that’s certainly worth a story. Even more so if it’s Trump. Nominators of stature may wield this power to shine a light on neglected causes or deserving people, but any journalist covering such a declaration should be aware that it is the stature of the nominator, not the nomination itself, that gives it news value.
Perhaps this is why Trump pressured the Japanese PM Shinzo Abe to nominate him, or perhaps he just didn’t know Devin Nunes could have served the same purpose – possessing both promotional savvy and unfathomable ignorance, both seem plausible.
Comments
We encourage anyone to comment, please consult the oD commenting guidelines if you have any questions.