I am a person of very little understanding so please my friends, can you make it clear to me that why Barrack Obama, President of US was given Nobel peace prize as I was told that these prizes are given for people who has done something very much remarkable in a certain field so that means Obama must has done something especial in increasing peace in the world.
What is that ,can you enlighten me please ?
Bhartiya No. 1 (Nationalist) 01 August 2010
Tusharji,
These things are happenning due to lobbying and politicization. It is being abused and criticized widely. Just go thru this
Among other criticisms, the Nobel Committees have been accused of having a political agenda, and of omitting more deserving candidates. They have also been accused of Eurocentrism. This is especially true for the Literature Prize.[120][121][122]
One of the most controversial Peace Prizes was the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Barack Obama.[123] Nominations had closed only eleven days after Obama took office as President.[72] Obama himself stated that he did not feel he deserved the award,[124][125] and that he did not feel worthy of the company the award would place him in.[126] Past winners of the Peace Prize were divided, some saying that Obama deserved the award, and others saying he had not yet earned it. Obama's award, along with the previous Peace Prizes for Jimmy Carter and Al Gore, prompted accusations of a left-wing bias.[127]
Among the most criticised Nobel Peace Prizes was the one awarded to Henry Kissinger and Lê Ðức Thọ, who later declined the prize.[128] This led to two Norwegian Nobel Committee members resigning. Kissinger and Thọ were awarded the prize for negotiating a ceasefire between North Vietnam and the United States in January 1973. However, when the award was announced hostilities still occurred from both sides.[129] Many critics were of the opinion that Kissinger was not a peace-maker but the opposite; responsible for widening the war.[67][130]
Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin received the Peace Prize in 1994 for their efforts in making peace between Israel and Palestine.[67][131] According to journalist Caroline Frost many issues, such as the plight of Palestinian refugees, had not been addressed[132] and no lasting peace was established between Israel and Palestine.[133] Immediately after the award was announced one of the five Norwegian Nobel Committee members denounced Arafat as a terrorist and resigned.[134] Additional misgivings of Arafat were widely expressed in various newspapers.[135]
The award of the 2004 Literature Prize to Elfriede Jelinek drew a protest from a member of the Swedish Academy, Knut Ahnlund. Ahnlund resigned, alleging that selecting Jelinek had caused "irreparable damage to all progressive forces, it has also confused the general view of literature as an art." He alleged that Jelinek's works were "a mass of text shovelled together without artistic structure."[136][137] The 2009 Literature Prize to Herta Müller also generated criticism. According to The Washington Post many US literary critics and professors had never previously heard of her.[138] This made many feel that the prizes were too Eurocentric.[139]
In 1949, the Portuguese neurologist Antonio Egas Moniz received the Physiology or Medicine Prize for his development of the prefrontal leucotomy. The previous year Dr. Walter Freeman had developed a version of the procedure which was faster and easier to carry out. Due in part to the publicity surrounding the original procedure, Freeman's procedure was prescribed without due consideration or regard for modern medical ethics. Endorsed by such influential publications as The New England Journal of Medicine, lobotomy became so popular that about 5,000 lobotomies were performed in the United States in the three years immediately following Moniz's receipt of the Prize.[140][141]
The Norwegian Nobel Committee confirmed that Mahatma Gandhi was nominated for the Peace Prize in 1937–39, 1947 and a few days before he was assassinated in January 1948.[142] Later members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee expressed regret that he was not given the prize.[143] In 1948, the year of Gandhi's death, the Nobel Committee declined to award a prize on the Norwegian grounds that "there was no suitable living candidate" that year.[143][144] Later, when the Dalai Lama was awarded the Peace Prize in 1989, the chairman of the committee said that this was "in part a tribute to the memory of Mahatma Gandhi."[145] Other high profile individuals with widely recognised contributions to peace have been missed out. As well as Gandhi, Foreign Policy lists Eleanor Roosevelt, Václav Havel, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Sari Nusseibeh, Corazon Aquino and Liu Xiaobo as people who "never won the prize, but should have."[146]
The Literature Prize also has criticised omissions. Adam Kirsch has suggested that many notable writers have missed out on the award for political or extra-literary reasons. The heavy focus on European and Swedish authors has been a subject of criticism.[147][148] The Eurocentric nature of the award was acknowledged by Peter Englund, the 2009 Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, as a problem with the award and was attributed to the tendency for the academy to relate more to European authors.[149] Notable writers that have been overlooked for the Literature Prize include; Émile Zola, Jorge Luis Borges, Marcel Proust, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, August Strindberg, John Updike, Arthur Miller, Graham Greene and Mark Twain.[150][151][152]
The strict rule against awarding a prize to more than three people at once is also controversial.[153] When a prize is awarded to recognise an achievement by a team of more than three collaborators one or more will miss out. For example, in 2002, the prize was awarded to Koichi Tanaka and John Fenn for the development of mass spectrometry in protein chemistry, an award that did not recognise the achievements of Franz Hillenkamp and Michael Karas of the Institute for Physical and Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Frankfurt.[154][155] Similarly, the prohibition of posthumous awards fails to recognise achievements by an individual or collaborator who dies before the prize is awarded. In 1962, Francis Crick, James D. Watson, and Maurice Wilkins were awarded the Physiology or Medicine Prize for discovering the structure of DNA. Rosalind Franklin, a key contributor in that discovery, died of ovarian cancer four years earlier.[156]
Alfred Nobel left his fortune to finance annual prizes to be awarded "to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind." He stated that the Nobel Prizes in Physics should be given "to the person who shall have made the most important 'discovery' or 'invention' within the field of physics." Nobel did not emphasise discoveries, but they have historically been held in higher respect by the Nobel Prize Committee than inventions: 77% of the Physics Prizes have been given to discoveries, compared with only 23% to inventions. Christoph Bartneck and Matthias Rauterberg, in papers published in Nature and Technoetic Arts, have argued this emphasis on discoveries has moved the Nobel Prize away from its original intention of rewarding the greatest contribution to society.[157][158]
An example where discovery has been preferred over theory is Albert Einstein's prize. His 1921 Physics prize recognised his discovery of the photoelectric effect rather than his Special Theory of Relativity.[159][160][161] Historian Robert Friedman proposes that this may be due to the Nobel Prize Committee's discrimination against theoretical science.[162]
Source : From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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