Obama and the Peace Prize

01.11.2009

On Friday, 9th October, the US President Barack Obama was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel Committee awarded the honour to world's most powerful man for "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples". The committee highlighted Mr Obama's efforts to strengthen international bodies and promote nuclear disarmament. The first African American to hold his country's highest office, Obama has called for disarmament and worked to restart the stalled Middle East peace process since taking office in January.

So what do you think of President Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize?  I'm nonplussed, I think the prize still seems very premature, before he had made any concrete foreign policy achievement.

What has he done?  Obama's work on the Middle East is sensible but hasn't produced any results yet. Likewise, Obama's efforts on nuclear disarmament/non-proliferation are important, but they are purely aspirational at this point. Surely all the hard work is yet to come!  What about Afghanistan?  He is facing demands for an increase in US forces there, which would mean more war, more death, hardly an encouraging example from a peace prize winner.

On human rights, the committee did not spell it out but the proposed closure of Guantanamo Bay and the end to torture by all US agencies must have been in its mind. Guantanamo is supposed to be closed by early next year.  Is this likely to be achieved, though?  In other areas, Obama has done little.  He's been largely absent on Sudan, Congo, Burma and global poverty and health issues.  He is also struggling to get American corporations to support moves on tackling global warming.

All these problems illustrate the intentions of the president, but also how far he has to go.  Should the Nobel Peace Prize symbolize what he might possibly accomplish sometime way off in the future? Especially when there are so many people who have worked for years and years on the front lines, often in dangerous situations, to make a difference to the most voiceless people of the world?

Tell us what do you think about it in our new Peace Channel forum.

Some curious details:

The Nobel Peace Prize was invented in the 1895 by the Swedish industrialist and inventor of dynamite Alfred Nobel, and was first awarded in 1901.

Northern Ireland has more Nobel Peace Prize winners than any other place on the planet! Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams were awarded it in 1976 in appreciation of their creation of the 'Peace People' movement - the most significant peace movement in Irish history. John Hume and David Trimble were also awarded the prize following the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. We even have a fifth nobelist - Seamus Heaney - who won the prize for literature - not bad for a country with only 1.7 million people.