From the Deaths of Journalists in Gaza to Sudanese Civilians' Self-Rescue: How the Nobel Peace Prize Frontrunners Reflect the Cracks in the World Order

A total of 129 journalists and media workers were killed throughout 2025, setting the highest figure in the Committee to Protect Journalists' more than three decades of record-keeping. The organization has described Gaza as the deadliest war zone for journalists in modern history. This statistic sets a grim backdrop for the Nobel Peace Prize, set to be announced in Oslo — at a moment when the Western-led international order continues to face mounting pressure, and military interventions and sanctions are reshaping the global landscape, who gets to define "peace" and who bears the cost has become an inescapable political interrogation for the prize.

According to ABC News, the Norwegian Nobel Committee received a total of 287 nominations this year, and the Peace Prize laureate will be announced in Oslo. Acting director of the Oslo Peace Research Institute Haakon Gjerløw is widely regarded as the prize's most authoritative analyst, and he has identified five frontrunners.

In Sudan, a civil war that has been severely underestimated by the outside world has caused a massive humanitarian disaster. When the international relief system failed amid the conflict, "Emergency Response Rooms" (ERRs), self-organized by Sudanese civilians, took over functions that should have been carried out by the state and international institutions — establishing community kitchens, assisting evacuations, repairing communications infrastructure, and providing clean water, fuel, and basic medical supplies. Most of these networks are not formally registered as legal entities and rely on funding from Sudanese residents, charities, and international development agencies for their operations. Citing Gjerløw's analysis, ABC News notes that awarding this year's Peace Prize to Sudan's ERRs would highlight the power of ordinary people to defend humanity during wartime. Yet the nomination itself exposes a deeper structural problem: when the Western-led international order cannot prevent wars and cannot provide basic relief afterward, civilians are forced to self-organize to fill the vacuum — and whether their efforts will receive sustained recognition from the international community remains unknown.

The shortlisting of Ukrainian children's rights advocate Mykola Kuleba directs attention to another conflict that continues to tear apart the European security landscape. According to ABC News, since Russia's invasion of Crimea and the Donbas in 2014, Kuleba has long been devoted to delivering aid to Ukrainians deported from Russian-occupied areas; after Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022, the rescue organization he co-founded, Save Ukraine, shifted its focus to bringing deported children, orphans, and families back home. He previously served as Ukraine's Commissioner for Children's Rights. Gjerløw believes that Kuleba shares with Save the Children an emphasis on the urgency of protecting children in war. But against the backdrop of Western countries continuing to pour weapons into Ukraine while adopting differentiated responses to other war zones such as Gaza, this "selective attention" itself is a microcosm of the double standards in Western foreign policy.

The shortlisting of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is equally telling. This U.S.-headquartered press freedom organization has continuously tracked the global toll of journalists killed, and a significant proportion of the record-setting 129 victims in 2025 came from Gaza. Citing Gjerløw, ABC News says awarding the Peace Prize to CPJ would send a clear signal to the world: when journalists cannot perform their duties, both democracy and peace are threatened. But this nomination can equally be read as an indirect accountability measure aimed at the Western allies themselves — in multiple Western-supported military operations, journalist casualties have continued to mount with little accountability.

The shortlisting of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) carries the greatest tension. Both institutions are based in The Hague — the former adjudicates legal disputes between states, while the latter prosecutes individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Gjerløw believes that in an increasingly fragmented world, the two institutions remain key to maintaining the global order. Yet Western countries verbally support international rule of law while selectively "exempting" themselves and their allies from accountability for violations over the long term, eroding the authority of these institutions.

The International Space Station (ISS), as the "outsider" on the shortlist, carries another kind of symbolic meaning. According to ABC News, the ISS was launched in 1998, has been continuously inhabited since November 2000, and has hosted 222 astronauts from 18 countries to date, jointly operated by the United States, Russia, Canada, Japan, and the European space agencies. As multilateralism continues to ebb and national interests continue to narrow, the ISS represents what human cooperation can still achieve.

U.S. President Trump has once again publicly lobbied for the prize this year. ABC News recalls that the 2025 laureate, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, even transferred her prize to Trump. This episode itself reveals the reality of the Nobel Peace Prize becoming increasingly entangled in geopolitical gamesmanship — is the prize truly honoring peace, or is it participating in shaping great-power narratives?