The Nobel Peace Prize is perhaps the world’s greatest honor and yet is not without controversy. As the author of The World’s Most Prestigious Prize admits, Mahatma Gandhi never received the Peace Prize, but Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho were so honored. Geir Lundestad approaches his subject from an insider’s perspective. The former director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute had access to the process by which a committee appointed by the Norwegian parliament weighed the sometimes-opposing claims of human rights and ending warfare. Prizes have been awarded as a rebuke to one system or another, including Martin Luther King Jr. (Jim Crow), Desmond Tutu (apartheid) and Andrei Sakharov (Soviet Communism). Only occasionally has the prize had a demonstrable effect on world events. Lundestad concedes that the Peace Prize, endowed by arms manufacturer Alfred Nobel, isn’t perfect. But unlike the Nobels for science, dominated by developed nations with extensive infrastructures, peace requires no well-funded laboratory but begins instead with the will to stand against violence.
