A lot of people don't understand what the Nobel Peace Prize is for. It's not to recognize old guys who promoted peace during their life; it's to promote peace.

A lot of people don't understand what the Nobel Peace Prize is for. It's not to recognize old guys who promoted peace during their life; it's to promote peace. Imagine that you have made some millions and you are deciding between starting the next ycombinator and using the money to promote peace. How would you go about the latter? Pretty much like the former: risky investments with a big potential payoff, only in peace rather than shares. Saying that giving the award to Obama or Kissinger was a mistake is like saying that YCombinator is stupid because most of their investments don't pay off. If they only gave money to companies which they knew were going to be successful, they wouldn't be having any effect on their success. So, Is it worth giving Manning and/or Snowden the Peace Prize? It would certainly focus the media's attention on them, but they have it already to some extent. It might work against the narrative that the securicrats are promoting. In some sense, Manning is a better candidate than Snowden: Manning released information which showed injustices of the Iraq and Afghan wars, whereas Snowden's releases are thus far an issue of whether domestic security is out of control. The Nobel remit covers the former; I'm not sure it covers the latter.