Who Deserves the Nobel Peace Prize? : A qualitative study on interpreting criteria

Sammanfattning: The ability to identify, distinguish and explain discourses in written and spoken language is a greatly important epistemological consideration in modern thinking across humanities and social sciences (Shabani & Dogolsara, 2015). This study aims to decipher how well the original criteria, provided by Alfred Nobel in his testament, remains intact in the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s deliberation process, by studying laureation cases from the past 50 years- revealing discursive themes, trends, patterns and shifts in the committee's interpretation of said criteria. The study discloses, despite heavy regulations and rules of secrecy to uphold, that more can be said about how considerably little the criteria contributes to the  prize-awarding body’s decisions, which ultimately changes the lives of peace builders all over the world. Their choice of Nobel Peace Prize winners simultaneously contributes to individuals’ understandings of peace embodiment, and works as a timestamp for observing peace definitions. Discourse analysis aims to understand a certain perspective, beyond literal definitions of linguistic expressions, moving into intention and interpretation- which are the utmost central methodological and analytical considerations of this thesis.  Mainstream peace research and theories are quite sprawled in regard to which concepts should be included under the term peace, moreover, definitions are time-bound and reflect an occurrence-and-response system in which events affecting the equilibrium between conflict and peace steer theorists in what they prioritise, in order to understand this phenomenon over a time spectrum.