Can we really blame Donald Trump for wanting the Nobel Peace Prize?

US President Donald Trump has made no bones about coveting the Nobel Peace Prize. While this has caused endless mirth in social media, his aspiration is an opportunity to examine the popular understanding of peace and pacifism.

Peace is frequently reduced to “opposition to war” after a war has started. Moral discomfort with falling bombs, fleeing refugees and dead civilians that appears once violence is no longer deniable is, at best, a retrospective humanism, not pacifism.

True pacifism is a principled stance against militarism, which normalises “war-readiness” as a permanent condition of national and global life. It involves an opposition to the political economy of perpetual conflict which makes wars inevitable.

Pacifism also stands in opposition to imperialism and its contemporary variants. It is opposed to military force for “peacekeeping” and “humanitarian” interventions that serve as instruments for maintaining neo-colonial domination. Militarism is usually defined in terms of using the national military in foreign interventions.

However, it also pertains to border policing, arms trade, surveillance regimes and the glorification of “strongmen” leaders.

The dilution of peace

Originally conceived of to honour those who actively worked toward disarmament and international fraternity, the Nobel Peace Prize has, over time, effectively promoted a dilution of how the world understands peace and pacifism. It perpetuates narratives that rarely question the forces that made war desirable or profitable in the first place.

The Nobel Peace Prize promotes a managerial notion of peace by recognising “statesmanly” leaders for brokering ceasefires, presiding over fragile treaties or calling for “peace” after engaging in or enabling war. It can be legitimately argued that the prize has often come to reward imperial maturity, not moral courage.

One of the most scandalous moments in Nobel history came in 1973 when Henry Kissinger, who orchestrated coups, bombings and mass killings across Southeast Asia and Latin America, received the award. He received it jointly with North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho, who declined it.

Earlier, Theodore Roosevelt was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for mediating an end to the Russo-Japanese War despite being an aggressive expansionist who believed in American supremacy. Barack Obama, who received the prize in 2009 merely for his aspirational rhetoric, presided over a vast expansion of drone warfare and arms sales.

These instances should not be considered errors but rather features of a system in which the understanding of pacifism was being diluted.

Cultural nationalists and neo-imperial politicians find in peace awards an opportunity to whitewash their legacies with a veneer of moral legitimacy. For all practical purposes, these are figures whose careers are often built on the mobilisation of warlike sentiment, xenophobia, or the rhetoric of national humiliation and revivalism.

No shortage of peace agreements

In 1978, Menachem Begin of Israel shared the prize with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat for the Camp David Accords, which led to a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. In 1994, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres were jointly awarded the prize with Yasser Arafat of the Palestine Liberation Organization for their efforts in the Oslo Accords.

These awards have been celebrated for symbolising diplomatic breakthroughs, but with the benefit of hindsight we can see how they involved overlooking continued occupation and militarism. The world has not suffered from a shortage of peace treaties. It has, though, suffered from the institutionalisation of war as a mechanism of global governance. The military-industrial complex, first named by US President Dwight Eisenhower, now operates as a transnational system, fusing state policy, corporate profit and strategic dominance.

Among the most visible Nobel Peace Laureates are many who have either catalysed, escalated, or strategically exploited conflict. Their gestures toward peace are often seen as grand statesmanship even as peace is just a tactical choice for them. The “peace” they achieve is often nothing more than a momentary truce in which power is consolidated and the winners gain international stature.

Performing nationalism, masculinity

Modern states, especially in the post-colonial and post-Cold War world, are deeply enmeshed in the global military-industrial complex, whether through weapons procurement, defence alliances or domestic policing. Militarism thrives on both the threat and the reality of conflict, which opens up markets for arms, surveillance, reconstruction and extractive access to resources.

Militarism is also an ideology that normalises preparation for war as the default mode of statecraft. The language of nationalism, masculinity and technological prowess makes militarism not only a foreign policy strategy but also a cultural and psychological outlook. Peace movements and activists are maligned, surveilled, and/or attacked using this language. An aggressive, anti-pacifist narrative relies heavily on a gendered performance of leadership: strong, decisive, masculine, often militarised.

This archetype is not easily countered by pacifist opposition because conscientious objectors or the gentle humanitarians are hounded out of public life using machinations that are difficult to evidence and their supporters are tagged as looney conspiracy theorists.

This is the context in which true pacifism is structurally disallowed and the Nobel Peace Prize is in no danger of ushering in radical questioning of the entrenched economic interests. This is exactly what makes the prize so desirable to Trump. And exactly why environmental and peace activist Greta Thunberg will probably never be a good candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Imperialism dressed as peace

Witnessing the relentless devastation of Gaza by Israel for over two years now, we know that the talk after World War II about the end of the era of colonial conquest was effective, large-scale propaganda. In reality, imperialism, both overt as in colonial conquest and covert as in proxy war (and economic coercion), continued unabated as system of domination. It is a system that produces conflict, making wars a key sector in the global economy. Any notion of “peace” that does not reckon with this system is not pacifist.

The Global South’s persistent exposure to civil wars, coups and foreign interventions is not a mere coincidence but a legacy of imperial interests reorganised through post-colonial and neo-liberal logics. From Afghanistan to Libya, Iraq to Haiti, interventions framed as “peacebuilding” have left devastation in their wake, while enriching contractors, arms suppliers and geopolitical strategists.

It is not as if the West or Global North has not had a pacifist movement. Some actual pacifists have even won the Nobel Peace Prize. Figures like Jane Addams, who opposed World War I and founded the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, were vilified in their time and later reduced to vague icons of goodwill. Addams and Bertha von Suttner, the author of Lay Down Your Arms, who shaped early peace movements in Europe, are today scarcely remembered outside specialist circles.

Even Martin Luther King Jr, whose speeches explicitly linked racism, capitalism, and militarism, is remembered more in the official narratives for his “I Have a Dream” speech.

Like Gandhi, their critique was went beyond violence to the moral and political order of imperialism that makes violence logical and profitable – a critique too dangerous to be preserved in full. This is the reason why pacifists who oppose not just the outbreak of war but the whole scaffolding that prepares for war, and profits from it, are marginalised as ineffective idealists and their legacy muted.

Making peace unrecognisable

Indeed, the Nobel Peace Prize has, in recent decades, increasingly gone to figures whose work may be admirable and even vital, but not centrally concerned with opposing war, leave alone militarism.

This trend reflects how the Nobel Committee shifts the understanding of “peace”. While the award stopped being about radical opposition to militarism or war long ago, it is now associated more with human rights, education, or development work. The recent laureates speak within the acceptable bounds of international diplomacy and humanitarian discourse, without directly confronting the role of powerful states, arms industries, or military interventions.

More recent Nobel Peace Prize winners appear selectively curated to perpetuate an impression that wars are caused by ethnic strife which is a problem peculiar to the third world or the global south only where societies are backward and violent. This is apart from the narrative that racism and apartheid have been addressed and are a thing of the past. And, last but not the least, that gender equality and democracy are imperilled only in Muslim-majority nations. These are also the very meta-narratives which have justified neo-imperialist wars.

Trump’s claims to brokering “peace” in international conflicts align with an aversion to “costly” “foreign” wars among his MAGA supporters. They rightly see this as disconnected from American people’s interests but definitely do not oppose militarism.

Donald Trump wants the Nobel Peace Prize as a trophy of global prestige and it is fitting that his aspirations are being endorsed by authoritarian and military figures – a nod to his transactional approach. He would probably receive it too, except if the Norwegian Nobel Committee is sensitive to a strong global opinion educated on social media in a critique of the military-industrial complex.

Ghazala Jamil is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University.