Originally published 2021-01-31.
Yes, Black Lives Matter was nominated for the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize. The nomination was submitted by Petter Eide, a Norwegian member of parliament for the Socialist Left Party, and made public at the end of January 2021, just before the nomination deadline. The movement did not win: the 2021 prize went to journalists Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov. Here is what the nomination meant, why Eide made it, and how the Nobel process actually works.
Who nominated BLM, and why
Eide said he put the movement forward for its struggle against racism and racially motivated violence. In his explanation to reporters he argued that rising conflict driven by inequality was one of the defining problems of the time, not only in the United States but in Europe and Asia too, and that BLM had done more than any other group to raise global awareness of racial injustice.
He also praised the movement’s breadth. In his view it had drawn in people far beyond the Black communities most affected by police violence, which set it apart from earlier civil rights campaigns. Giving the prize to BLM, he said, “will send a powerful message that peace is founded on equality, solidarity and human rights”.
The movement’s official account welcomed the news on 30 January 2021 with a confident statement about its global reach:
We hold the largest social movement in global history. Today, we have been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. People are waking up to our global call: for racial justice and an end to economic injustice, environmental racism, and white supremacy. We're only getting started ✊🏾 pic.twitter.com/xjestPNFzC
— Black Lives Matter (@Blklivesmatter) January 30, 2021
How a Nobel Peace Prize nomination works
A nomination sounds grand, but it is a low bar by design. The Norwegian Nobel Committee accepts proposals from a wide group of qualified nominators: members of national parliaments and governments, heads of state, members of international courts, certain university professors in fields such as history, law and philosophy, past laureates and former committee members. Self-nominations are not allowed.
Nominations must arrive by 31 January. The committee then draws up a shortlist, usually 20 to 30 names, which advisers study from March to August. The winner is chosen in early October and the prize is presented in Oslo on 10 December.
Crucially, the committee itself never reveals who was nominated. Its statutes keep nominations secret for 50 years. Everything the public learns at the time comes from nominators who choose to announce their own proposals, as Eide did. In 2021 the committee received 329 nominations, 234 for individuals and 95 for organisations, so being on the list says little about a candidate’s real chances.
Where Black Lives Matter came from
The phrase began as a hashtag in July 2013, created by organisers Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Ayọ (formerly Opal) Tometi after George Zimmerman was acquitted over the 2012 shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida. It became a national movement in 2014 after the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York.
The murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in May 2020 turned it into one of the largest protest waves in American history. Polls estimated that between 15 and 26 million people in the United States joined demonstrations that summer, and solidarity marches spread to Canada, Brazil, the UK, Australia and many other countries.
BLM is decentralised. There is a foundation, the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, plus dozens of autonomous local chapters and countless people who use the slogan without belonging to any organisation. That loose structure helps explain both its reach and the confusion over who speaks for it.
The Olof Palme Prize and other recognition
A year before the Nobel nomination, the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation received the 2020 Olof Palme Prize, a Swedish award worth 100,000 US dollars given for work on international understanding and common security. It is named after Sweden’s prime minister Olof Palme, who was shot dead in Stockholm on 28 February 1986. Older accounts sometimes say he was killed by a white supremacist, but that was never established. In June 2020 Swedish prosecutors named Stig Engström, a graphic designer who died in 2000, as the likely killer and closed the case because he could no longer be charged.
Were the 2020 protests peaceful? What the data says
Critics of the nomination pointed to the riots and looting that accompanied some protests. The best large-scale data offers a fuller picture. The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) recorded more than 7,750 BLM-linked demonstrations across more than 2,440 locations between late May and late August 2020, and found that over 93% involved no violence or destructive activity. Violent incidents were concentrated in fewer than 220 locations, often within a few city blocks. ACLED also found that authorities used force at BLM events far more often than at other demonstrations. Thinking Humanity covered that report here.
That does not mean the unrest was harmless. Several people were killed during the turmoil of 2020. In early June, AP reported a rising death toll that included David Dorn, a 77-year-old retired St. Louis police captain shot dead outside a ransacked pawn shop. In Kenosha, Wisconsin, in August 2020, Kyle Rittenhouse shot two men dead and wounded a third; he argued self-defence and was acquitted of all charges in November 2021. Both facts can be true at once: the vast majority of protests were peaceful, and a minority of events turned deadly.
Who else was nominated, and who won
Other publicly announced nominees for 2021 included the climate campaigner Greta Thunberg and the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who had just been jailed after returning to Russia.
On 8 October 2021 the committee announced that the prize would go to Maria Ressa of the Philippines and Dmitry Muratov of Russia “for their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace”.
What the nomination did and did not mean
The nomination was a political statement by one Norwegian legislator, and a meaningful one: it placed a protest movement against racism in the same conversation as past laureates such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela. It was not an endorsement by the Nobel Committee, which comments on no candidate except the winner. When you see a headline saying someone has been “nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize”, the useful questions are who made the nomination and whether that person was qualified to do so.
Sources: NBC News; h/t The Guardian (original report); Nobel Prize: nomination and selection; 2021 Nobel Peace Prize (Wikipedia); Black Lives Matter (Wikipedia); Olof Palme Prize (Wikipedia); NPR; ACLED; AP via KSAT; OPB.
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