The 2011 Nobel Peace Prize honors three women who have furthered the causes of peace and women’s rights in their own countries. According to the Nobel Committee, these women were chosen “for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work.”
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, first democratically elected female president of Liberia, shares the prize with countrywoman Leymah Gbowee and Tawakkul Karman of Yemen. Gbowee helped end the civil war in Liberia by organizing women of various ethnic and religious backgrounds to pray together for peace, according to ABC News. Gbowee also “promoted a ‘sex strike’” to engage the country’s men in the peace process, Reuters reports.
Karman, a journalist, has become a key player in the Arab Spring. Her contemporaries have nicknamed her “the iron woman” and “mother of the revolution,” according to The Huffington Post. The news of her win found her in a “protest tent in Change Square” still engaged in the pressing work improving her corner of the world.
The trio joins a short list of only 12 women to ever win the prize (85 men have won), including: Aung San Suu Kyi of Myanmar (formerly Burma), Mother Teresa, and more recently humanitarian Wangari Muta Maathai of Kenya (2004), who died last month.
Since 1901, 91 Nobel Peace prizes have been awarded to 98 individuals and 23 organizations.
U.S. President Barack Obama won the prize in 2009 “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”
The committee declined to award the prize on 19 occasions. According to the Nobel website, the committee’s guidelines specify that the prize should not be awarded if none of the nominees have the requisite qualifications. Most notably the prize was not awarded during most of WWI and WWII.
Three laureates were imprisoned at the time of their award: Aung San Suu Kyi, German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky, and Chinese human rights activist Liu Xiaobo.
Folklore has it that Winston Churchill won the Peace prize, but he actually never did. He was nominated, though, and he did win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953.
The youngest recipient of the prize was Mairead Corrigan (1976). She was 32, the same age as Karman (so it’s a tie now). Corrigan founded the Northern Ireland Peace Movement.
The oldest recipient was Joseph Rotblat in 1995. He was 87. Rotblat was a Polish scientist who worked “to diminish the part played by nuclear arms in international politics and, in the longer run, to eliminate such arms.”