By Kavita Mistry 
When “peace” became the politics of power
When María Corina Machado’s name appeared beneath the headline “Nobel Peace Prize, 2025,” the applause from Oslo echoed strangely hollow. It wasn’t shock that greeted the announcement—it was recognition. For many across the postcolonial world, the moment carried an uncomfortable déjà vu: another year, another moral prize consecrating political alignment as virtue. Peace, it seems, has become the art of pleasing power.
The Nobel Peace Prize once offered the illusion of a moral compass—a reminder that conscience could triumph over conquest. Today, it feels more like an instrument of choreography. It rewards not those who end wars but those who confirm the acceptable grammar of dissent. Machado’s selection, cast as the triumph of democracy, reads instead as an act of geopolitical affirmation: a reassurance that the old hemispheric script—liberal heroine versus populist tyrant—remains the West’s favourite morality play.
To call this a surprise would be naïve. In the century since ‘Alfred Nobel’s will’ invoked “fraternity among nations,” the committee has often mistook fraternity for familiarity. When it overlooked Gandhi and embraced Henry Kissinger, it revealed its moral elasticity. When it crowned Barack Obama on the eve of a surge in Afghanistan, it redefined “peace” as “potential.” And now, in Machado, it finds a Venezuelan who can play democracy’s ambassador without disturbing the grammar of the empire.
Her coronation is not about Venezuela’s struggle for democracy – real and painful as that is – but about symbolism. In Washington and Brussels, Machado stands as a cipher for “freedom” wrapped in market discipline, a face of opposition palatable to the architects of sanctions that have crippled her country’s economy. For Venezuelans queueing for food or medicine, the irony is bitter: a prize for peace to one who speaks the language of the powers that have deepened their crisis.
But perhaps irony is the Nobel’s native tongue. Year after year, the prize waltzes uneasily between idealism and expedience, choosing winners who fit the mood of the global establishment. Its moral theatre is as much about omission as about honour. Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba—each an avatar of resistance, each erased from the Nobel’s moral ledger. Only Nelson Mandela managed to slip through, and even then, in a duet with his former jailer.
To call Machado’s Nobel a “betrayal” might assume the existence of faith to betray. Perhaps the more honest word is “confirmation.” The prize confirms that “peace” today is not a moral condition but a strategic alignment, the moral translation of a geopolitical mood. Its worth is measured not in conscience but in compatibility—with markets, with diplomacy, with the Western gaze.
The Nobel Committee might reply that peace is always political—that neutrality itself is a fiction. True, but there is politics, and then there is orchestration. When the vocabulary of “freedom” becomes indistinguishable from the lexicon of regime change, when “human rights” are invoked selectively to justify sanctions that punish civilians, the line between conscience and control dissolves.
This year’s choice also says something about the afterlife of language. The word peace once carried the aroma of sacrifice—of Gandhi’s spinning wheel, of Martin Luther King’s marches, of the nuclear-age protests that treated morality as the last form of resistance. Now, peace smells like policy, drafted in the cool syntax of multilateral communiqués. It is less a moral aspiration than a public-relations strategy, less about silencing guns than about shaping headlines.
Still, the Nobel retains its shimmer. Even Donald Trump’s failed pursuit of it proved the prize’s strange magnetism. He claimed he “deserved” it—his admirers abroad dutifully echoed the claim—because, in his words, “no one has done more for peace.” The committee, perhaps fearing farce, ignored him. Yet the episode revealed the paradox: that a prize born to honour humility has become a token of global self-regard.
The Nobel Peace Prize today operates like a moral currency within a global market of recognition. It circulates between capitals, buying legitimacy, settling scores, rewarding ideological compliance. Each medal is a small act of diplomacy, a way for a committee in Oslo to remind the world which virtues are fashionable this season.
But fashion is not faith, and applause is not absolution. The moral confusion around Machado’s Nobel has less to do with her individual merit than with the shrinking moral horizon of the institutions that sanctify her. The prize no longer seeks to end wars—it seeks to curate narratives.
It is tempting to believe this is merely the way of the world—that all honours bend to politics. Yet the Nobel once hinted at something rarer: that morality, even briefly, could exist outside empire. It hinted that peace might be a universal language, spoken across ideologies. But that tongue has been co-opted, retranslated into the jargon of international finance and geopolitical strategy.
To reclaim peace as an idea, we may need to rescue it from the committees, the speeches, and the ceremonial applause. Peace does not need prizes; it needs courage. It survives not in Oslo’s marble halls but in refugee camps, picket lines, and prison cells—among those who practice justice without expecting medals for it. Peace no longer silences guns—it manages headlines.
If there is a lesson in Machado’s Nobel, it is this: institutions age, but conscience does not. The prize endures as spectacle, but its moral pulse now beats elsewhere—in the unrecognized acts of resistance that refuse to fit the geopolitical script. The Nobel may still glitter, but its glow is reflected light—the borrowed brilliance of those it forgot to honour.
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
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