Who will win the Nobel Peace Prize?

We'll find out the recipient of this year's Nobel Peace Prize on Friday and yes, you can have a bet on it at Smarkets.

The truth is, this is a very hard race to predict. I can't be certain of this, but I don't think last year's dual winners were on the list of any of the small number of betting sites that offered any odds. The World Food Programme, who won in 2020, were in the Smarkets market but didn't attract a single bet. Quite frequently the Norwegian Nobel Committee pick winners who are little known and working on conflicts that have had minimal media attention. The last time that anyone with widespread global recognition won was probably Mala Yousafzai in 2014.

The awarding committee does not reveal the list of nominees although we do know there are 343 candidates (251 individuals, 92 organisations). There are a very specific set of people and organisations who can submit a nomination including parliamentarians, academics in particular fields and previous winners themselves. We do know a few of the nominees (who have been confirmed by news agencies) including the opening favourites Alex Navalny and Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya.

This is a fairly niche and not particularly liquid betting market but there have been a few failed gambles in recent years. Greta Thunberg went off at odds-on in 2019 but lost out to the second favourite, Abiy Ahmed. In 2020 and 2021 most people assumed that an organisation involved with pandemic relief or vaccine research might win but that proved to be an unprofitable bet on both occasions.

Who's going to win this year? Well, check out the shortlist drawn up by the Director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo. His top pick in 20201 was Reporters Without Borders which wasn't a bad guess seeing as the winners were in fact two crusading journalists. The 2019 and 2018 winners also featured on his list in those years. Otherwise, I think I'd avoid picking obvious famous names as they seem not to win very often - presumably one of the purposes of the award is to highlight work that is otherwise getting little attention. Nominations closed at the end of January which might preclude some of the efforts involved in stopping the Russian war in Ukraine, although the International Court of Justice did issue a judgement on this so perhaps they might have a decent chance as a result. 

Image courtesy Government Press Office (Israel), CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22811903