It is different for Peace prize , it has always been political and different from day one , it is awarded by Norwegian noble committee which is appointed by the Norwegian parliament.
All other prizes are awarded in Sweden by Swedish academy(for literature) , Royal Swedish Academy for sciences (physics and chemistry) , karolinska institute (physiology) are all professionally established organizations at the time of Nobel’s death with other activities professional organizations do.
Norwegian Nobel committee while in theory independent is just people appointed by the parliament with no need to have professional standing in their field on which they are supposed to award the prize in and it always shows .
Obama’s prize is hardly the first egregious one or even the most outrageous Henry Kissinger got one .
So it kind of matters on the changed standards in swedish technical ones while peace has been disaster for half century or more , with non transparent process selected by ex- MPs
Obama’s and Kissinger’s prizes are both disastrous for entirely different reasons. And I don’t mean anything partisan by that. Kissinger was awarded a peace prize for achieving a cease fire in the Vietnam war … a war in which he’d personally been responsible for some of the worst and most illegal excesses. Obama was awarded the peace prize for literally nothing. It was anticipatory, meant to urge him towards ending American wars in the Middle East (he escalated instead). The Nobel committee gets it wrong looking both forwards and backwards.
It is less about on what reasons made them poor laureates specifically and more important on what is wrong with the process itself
Unless the process of selection of the committee (unqualified, political) and process of selection of the winner(opaque and inconsistent criteria) is fixed we will have poor candidates winning it in the future too
Unlike the economic prize peace was one that Alfred Noble actually wanted himself to be an award given too.
One could also argue peace prize should be the most important of them all. Noble wished to mitigate the military application of his invention, the peace prize should be achieving that most.
The continued poor judgment of the parliament in selecting the committee and the committee in selecting winners devalues the prize for future winners and devalues the good work the Swedish institutions have put in making it the premier award in their fields
