Peace Be With You Trivia Quiz

Answer:

It was a bit disheartening to read through the list of recipients between 1901 and 2024 and see how many were awarded for ending a conflict which in retrospect was not actually finished at that time, often not yet. My selection of recipients therefore concentrated on people who had gained the award on the basis of work that set up a structure with enduring impact, or whose work has continued to transform the culture of their nation and/or the world.

The first Nobel Peace Prize was awarded in 1901 to Henri Dunant and Frédéric Passy, shared equally. Henri Dunant was recognised "for his humanitarian efforts to help wounded soldiers and create international understanding". More specifically, he was the founder of the International Committee of the Red Cross in 1863, and the driving force behind the establishment of the Geneva Convention in 1864. The Red Cross itself was to win the award in 1917 and 1944 (the only awards made during the years of the two World Wars) and jointly with the League of Red Cross societies in 1963. Frédéric Passy was recognised as an internationally-acknowledged worker for peace; amongst other activities in that realm, he founded the first French Peace Society, which held a congress in Paris during the 1878 World Exhibition.

In 1919, American president Woodrow Wilson won the prize "for his role as founder of the League of Nations". Following the refusal of the US Senate to ratify the nation's membership of the League of Nations, his nomination was considered controversial, but a majority of the committee agreed to the award. The vision of the League of Nations was that it would provide an international forum for the resolution of disputes, removing the need for war.

While the League of Nations did have some success, it ultimately failed to avoid World War II, and was replaced following that conflict with the United Nations. The 1945 award to Cordell Hull "for his indefatigable work for international understanding and his pivotal role in establishing the United Nations" was based on the hope that this revised structure for an international forum would work.

In 1931 Jane Addams shared the Peace Prize with Nicholas Murray Butler, who had made as significant contribution to the establishment of the International Court at the Hague. The joint recognition of "their assiduous effort to revive the ideal of peace and to rekindle the spirit of peace in their own nation and in the whole of mankind" recognised this, along with the role Jane Addams played as the founder of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in 1915, and her subsequent work for disarmament.

Priest, medical doctor, philosopher, musician (whose concert performances helped raise funds for the hospital he and his wife established at Lambaréné, in Gabon) - Albert Schweitzer was a multi-talented person, whose approach to missionary work that respected the culture of those with whom he worked led the Nobel Peace committee to recognise "his altruism, reverence for life, and tireless humanitarian work which has helped making the idea of brotherhood between men and nations a living one" in 1952.

The Nobel Peace committee awarded a number of prizes in recognition of people who sought to use non-violent activism to promote change. In 1948 they famously made no award, as they stated that there was no suitable candidate - the award conditions stipulate that the recipient must be living, and Mohandas Gandhi (who had been nominated) was assassinated in January of 1948.

In 1964 the Peace Prize was awarded to American Martin Luther King Jr. "for his non-violent struggle for civil rights for the Afro-American population"; in 1989 Tibetan Tenzin Gyatso (referred to in the citation by his title, the 14th Dalia Lama) was cited "for advocating peaceful solutions based upon tolerance and mutual respect in order to preserve the historical and cultural heritage of his people"; 1993 saw South Africans Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk recognised "for their work for the peaceful termination of the apartheid regime, and for laying the foundations for a new democratic South Africa". Liu Xiabo, a participant in the student protests on Tiananmen Square in 1989 who subsequently served multiple jail terms for this and other protests seeking a more democratic society, received the 2010 Peace Prize "for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China".

The 2024 Peace Prize went to a Japanese group known as Nihon Hidankyo "for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again". The group was established in 1956 in Nagasaki, the second of the two Japanese cities on which the United States forces had dropped nuclear bombs during the final days of World War II. Civilian survivors of these events, known as Hibakusha, along with people injured in the course of nuclear weapon testing on a number of Pacific islands came together to form The Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organisations, shortened in Japanese to Nihon Hidankyo. While their immediate purpose was improving the rights of Hibakusha (who had suffered stigma as being shameful survivors rather than having died a noble death), they also sought to prevent a recurrence of the events that had created the group in the first place. Their motto, No more Hibakusha, reflects their aim of ensuring that nuclear weapons are never again used in warfare.