A Nobel Peace Prize to be proud of

When the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced South African jurist Navi Pillay as recipient of the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize, they engaged in a very pleasing if not predicable political somersault. Last year’s heinous award, given to Venezuelan warmonger and Donald Trump acolyte Maria Corina Machado, had many proclaiming that the esteemed prize was now totally and forever discredited, a useless 20th century relic that was no longer a measure of any true peace paradigm.

I argued, however, that the prize was always thus: a mixture of left-center-right juggling that has always shifted from some very problematic awards (as in the classic awarding to Henry Kissinger) to amazing and extremely strategic choices — such as the granting of East Timor’s Jose Ramos Horta the prize in the midst of his nation’s struggle for independence, or the awarding of Archbishop Tutu at a time when he had gone out on a limb endorsing sanctions against apartheid South Africa when the liberal establishment suggested that sanctions would only hurt Black South Africans.

With the outcry one year ago against Machado, and the subsequent media circus when she traveled to Washington, D.C. to gift her prize to Trump, it should serve as no surprise that the Nobel Committee attempts to balance the see-saw this year by awarding a progressive if not radical activist. The 2026 award, though, has some important elements of significant merit.

As United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, or UNHCR, from 2008 to 2014, Navanethem Pillay distinguished herself as a modern jurist with a broad vision of what contemporary and future international law should look like. Serving as President Judge of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, Pillay was central in framing the landmark decision that rape can be and is a form of genocide rather than a “spoil of war.” Leading the International Criminal Court at the Hague, Pillay presided over cases condemning the use of child soldiers in the Congo and elsewhere. Her support of LGBTQ rights and broad definitions of gender identity ultimately led to a UNHRC policy resolution on these rights, passed in 2011.

More recently, Pillay’s chairing of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory determined both that Israel as well as Hamas had committed war crimes in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, and primarily that Israel’s actions in Gaza over the past several years constituted acts of genocide.

This broad overview of human rights-as-peace practices places Pillay’s award firmly in keeping with her South African brethren awardees. Madiba Nelson Mandela’s leadership in bringing his country from the brink of civil war to a post-apartheid modernity, Archbishop Tutu’s Ubuntu philosophy embracing the humanity of all people as “rainbow people of God,” and Chief Albert Luthuli’s foundational nonviolence practices in fighting the racist regime were all examples of well-deserved Nobel Peace Prize determinations.

An award to a leading Palestinian organizer would have been ideal. But Navvi Pillay’s prize should be seen as a victory for all people interested in restoring an international legal and human rights framework to a world in crisis due to unilateral acts of barbarism, plundering and violence escalation.   

Justice as peace

There are those within Nobel Peace circles who have long criticized the Norwegian Committee for straying too far from the will of Alfred Nobel, who stipulated that the award should go 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.” Norwegian peace activist Fredrik Heffermehl, for example, suggested that there has been a modern politicization of the prize, extending awards to those far beyond a strict, legal definition of Nobel’s wishes.

Some in agreement with this position joined with a score of human rights leaders to nominate the International Peace Research Association, or IPRA, and myself for this year’s award. They noted that our many recent conferences, writings and campaigns — on Indigenous land in Aotearoa, New Zealand, on Maroon territory in Trinidad and Tobago, in South Sudan and Colombia and other war-torn regions — both focused on justice-based concerns such as decolonization, an end to impunity, environmentalism and self-determination, but also promoted peace in the manner directly noted in the original development of the prize.

IPRA (and I) were greatly honored to be nominated by distinguished past Nobel Peace laureates Mairead Corrigan Maguire of Northern Ireland and Adolfo Perez Esquivel of Argentina, joined by Palestinian General-Secretary Joyce Ajlouny of the American Friends Service Committee, leaders of the International Peace Bureau, former Finnish President Tarja Halonen, now of the Council of Women World Leaders, and many others. Support from a recent and rare joint statement by the Fellowship of Reconciliation, War Resisters League, and AJ Muste Foundation for Peace and Justice, as well as spotlight by Newsweek, helped make this year a strong one for my work and the work of IPRA. Our slight disappointment, however, is easily overshadowed by our support for the 2026 awardee, whose views on the inseparable connections between justice and peace mirror our own.

No peace without an end to colonialism

A few activists have gone even further than Heffermehl, suggesting that “the peace movement” doesn’t focus enough on fighting war directly. At the June 2026 Resistance Studies conference held at the University of Massachusetts/Amherst, World Beyond War founder David Swanson criticized IPRA’s North American regional association, the Peace and Justice Studies Association, or PJSA, for being too focused on justice issues without enough anti-war emphasis.

Though we respect the good work of Swanson and World Beyond War, we also respectfully disagree. My own work, with the Spirit of Mandela coalition and international legal scholars Mireille Fanon Mendes-France and Richard Falk, suggest the need for new definitions of what it means to be “guilty of genocide.” Other key work, for example our staunch solidarity for the burgeoning Occupied People’s Forum — a network of peoples still under direct colonial military occupation, from Palestine to Puerto Rico, Kashmir to Tibet and elsewhere — are perfect examples of the essential nature of the confluence of contemporary war and human rights.

In testimony presented before the United Nations Fourth Committee hearings on the Question of Western Sahara, held on Oct. 8, I noted that IPRA’s research and academic reviews of conflict prevention “concur with the growing consensus that all forms of colonialism can be considered crimes against humanity, sometimes constituting a form of slow genocide. … History, and all the scholarly disciplines which make up our work, bring us to the same conclusion: without an end to all colonialism, which includes the freedom and self-determination of Western Sahara, there can and will be no peace.”

The awarding of the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize to Navi Pillay should be a cause for absolute celebration for all peace-loving and justice-seeking people the world over. Though we should never count on the Norwegian Nobel Committee to consistently “do the right thing,” theirs is an independent body, well-aware of the tumultuous torrents of current affairs. When a spotlight is shone on an exemplary woman of progressive legal, organizational and visionary significance, all peoples benefit from that warm glow.