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You, too, can become a Nobel Peace Prize nominee

In one simple step, you can be the next Jared Kushner

Analysis by
National columnist
February 1, 2021 at 10:55 a.m. EST
(Fernando Vergara/AP)

To the average reader, the news seems weighty. Former White House adviser (and presidential son-in-law) Jared Kushner was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in helping to shepherd peace deals between Israel and several Arab nations. The Peace Prize holds an outsize role in the public imagination, the ultimate indicator of the positive role a human being can play in the world. And here, it seems, the award might be on its way to Kushner — among the more polarizing figures in American politics over the past four years.

Except that he almost certainly won’t win it, any more than his father-in-law was likely to after his own nominations last year. As it turns out, while a Nobel Peace Prize nomination is a bit trickier than simply sending a guy in Norway a postcard with someone’s name on it, it’s not much trickier than that. A nomination is, in essence, as serious as the person doing the submitting — who is a member of a not particularly rarefied group of people.

Former president Donald Trump often mentioned the Nobel Peace Prize at campaign rallies, White House events and interviews. (Video: The Washington Post)

Before we explain how you, too, can earn a Nobel Peace Prize nomination, it's worth letting a bit of air out of the award itself. Yes, it is an important designator of efforts to shape the world for the better. But it is not itself a guarantee either of the moral purity of its recipients or of the security of their accomplishments. As Reuters broke the news about Kushner's nomination, the news organization was elsewhere reporting on a coup in Myanmar, during which the country's elected leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, was imprisoned by the military.

Suu Kyi is herself a Peace Prize recipient — and later faced trial for an alleged role in a genocide perpetrated against an ethnic minority in the country.

Should you seek to join such august company, you must first join the august company of Kushner by receiving a nomination to the prize. And for that, you're going to need to follow an exhaustive process, listed in order below:

1. Be nominated by a qualified individual.

Let’s walk through that list.

1. Be nominated by a qualified individual. One cannot be considered a Nobel Peace Prize nominee unless one is nominated for the prize. And for that, one of a select group of people — numbering no more than in the hundreds of thousands — must send a letter of nomination to the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

Where can one find an acceptable nominator? Well, the Nobel committee has a list explaining who can do so. It includes such elite individuals as members of the International Court of Justice in The Hague and those who have themselves been recipients of the prize.

It also includes “members of national assemblies and national governments of sovereign states” and “university professors, professors emeriti and associate professors of history, social sciences, law, philosophy, theology, and religion.” Among others.

In other words, a nomination for the prize is legitimate if, say, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), who is a member of the United States’ national assembly, sends a letter of nomination to the committee. A nomination is legitimate if you get the associate professor of history at Your Town State University to send a similar letter.

The National Center for Education Statistics tallied more than 830,000 full-time faculty at degree-granting postsecondary institutions in 2018, including anyone with the title of “professor, associate professor, assistant professor, instructor, lecturer, assisting professor, adjunct professor, or interim professor (or the equivalent).” Not all of them teach in the designated fields, of course, but obviously a lot of them do.

And that’s just in the United States.

At this point, you might be wondering who nominated Kushner. The answer that will appeal most to Nobel purists is that it was a professor emeritus of Harvard Law School, the sort of rarefied individual who the committee clearly hopes will weigh in on such important decisions. The answer that will be better understood by American political observers is that, according to Reuters, Kushner was nominated by Alan Dershowitz, a mainstay of cable-news prognostication and a generally loyal voice in support of Donald Trump’s administration. Yes, he’s a Harvard professor emeritus. He’s also the guy who argued to the Senate during Trump’s first impeachment trial that the then-president’s efforts to secure his own reelection by any means necessary were by default in the public interest.

In other words, all you need to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize is a nominator who is not necessarily concerned about how that nomination might be perceived publicly. Or really, not even that: The committee maintains the privacy of nominations for 50 years after they are submitted. One can be nominated for the prize now and not have that nomination scrutinized until the early 2070s. The cultural value of declaring oneself a Peace Prize nominee, though, has proved irresistible, given the cachet still associated with the prize.

You may at this point be discouraged to learn that the deadline for any such nomination is Jan. 31 in a given year. If you hope to win the 2021 prize, you are too late. But there is good news: “Nominations postmarked and received after this date are included in the following year’s discussions.”

Get the associate professor of your Philosophy 101 class to send in a letter now and by late 2022 you could be jetting off to Oslo to be handed your award. (If she waits until September to make the nomination, she can save time by using an online form.) If you don’t win, no one has to see the professor’s letter or any deliberation over your nomination until there have been another 12 presidential elections. But you, for the rest of your life, can refer to yourself as a Peace Prize nominee.

Imagine having that on your Tinder profile.