The winner of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on October 10. Here is a look at how the award works:

WHO DECIDES?

The Norwegian Nobel Committee, which consists of five individuals appointed by the Norwegian parliament. Members are often retired politicians, but not always. The current committee is led by the head of the Norwegian branch of PEN International, a group defending freedom of expression. Another member is an academic.

They are all put forward by Norwegian political parties and their appointments reflect the balance of power in Norway’s parliament.

WHO CAN WIN?

The short answer is: whoever fits the description set out in the 1895 will of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel. It says the prize should go to the person “who has done the most or best to advance fellowship among nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and the establishment and promotion of peace congresses”.

The more complicated answer is that the prize “needs to be placed in the current context”, according to Kristian Berg Harpviken, the award committee’s secretary, who prepares the work for the award body. He participates in the deliberations but does not vote.

“They will look at the world, see what is happening, what are the global trends, what are the main concerns, what are the most promising processes that we see,” he told Reuters.

“And processes here can mean anything from a specific peace process to a new type of international agreement that is under development or that has recently been adopted.”

WHO CAN NOMINATE?

Thousands of people can propose names: members of governments and parliaments; current heads of state; university professors of history, social sciences, law and philosophy; and former Nobel Peace Prize laureates, among others.

This year there are 338 nominees. The full list is locked in a vault for 50 years.

HOW DOES THE COMMITTEE DECIDE?

Nominations close on January 31. Members of the committee can make their own nominations no later than their first meeting in February.

They discuss all the nominations, then establish a shortlist. Each nominee is then assessed and examined by a group of permanent advisers and other experts.

The committee meets roughly once a month to discuss the nominations. The decision tends to be taken in August or in September, said Harpviken.

The committee seeks to reach a consensus on its selection. If it cannot, the decision is made by majority vote.

The last time a member quit in protest was in 1994, when Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat shared the prize with Israel’s Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin.

WHO IS NOMINATED?

While the full list of nominations is kept secret, nominators are free to disclose them. There is no way of verifying they have done as they have said.

Among the names disclosed this year are the International Criminal Court, NATO, jailed Hong Kong activist Chow Hang-tung and Canadian human rights lawyer Irwin Cotler.

The leaders of Cambodia, Israel and Pakistan have said they nominated U.S. President Donald Trump. Their nominations were made in spring and summer, after the January 31 deadline, so they are not valid for the 2025 prize.

COULD TRUMP WIN?

Only if he changes his policies, according to Nobel experts who argue that he is at present dismantling the international world order the award committee cherishes.

Instead, the committee may wish to highlight a humanitarian organisation, journalists, or a United Nations institution, they say. Or they could spring a surprise.

Last year’s winner was Japanese atomic bomb survivors group Nihon Hidankyo. The threat of nuclear weapons has been a long-standing focus of the committee.

WHAT DOES THE LAUREATE GET?

A medal, a diploma, 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.19 million) and immediate global attention.

WHEN ARE THE ANNOUNCEMENT AND THE CEREMONY?

The announcement will be made at 1100 CET (0900 GMT) on Friday, October 10 at the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo by the committee’s chair, Joergen Watne Frydnes.

The ceremony will take place at the Oslo City Hall on December 10, the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death.

Previous winners of the Nobel Peace Prize

The winner of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday in Oslo. Here are some of the best known past winners – and one person who did not win but should have.

MARTIN LUTHER KING

The leader of the U.S. civil rights movement was “the first person in the Western world to have shown us that a struggle can be waged without violence”, according to the then-chairman of the award body, Gunnar Jahn.

“He is the first to make the message of brotherly love a reality in the course of his struggle, and he has brought this message to all men, to all nations and races.”

At 35, he was also the youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate at the time. Today the youngest winner is Pakistan’s education campaigner Malala Yousafzai, who was 17 when she won in 2014.

NELSON MANDELA

The Nobel Peace Prize has been controversial on many occasions, but most agreed in 1993 that Mandela winning the award was “self-evident”, according to Geir Lundestad, the then-secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

Mandela spent 27 years in prison and still called for a peaceful transition to end apartheid in South Africa.

What was not self-evident was awarding the prize jointly with Frederik Willem de Klerk, the last white leader of South Africa, Lundestad said in his 2015 memoir.

Many said Mandela should have won alone, while others said Mandela could not make peace without a counterpart, recounted Lundestad. In the end, the prize was given to both to encourage the peaceful transition to a democratic South Africa, which was not completed by the time of the award.

HENRY KISSINGER AND LE DUC THO

Among the most controversial awards is the 1973 honouring of top U.S. diplomat Henry Kissinger and North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho for reaching the January 1973 Paris Peace Accords, under which Washington completed a military withdrawal from South Vietnam.

The committee’s decision shocked many at the time as Kissinger played a major role in U.S. military strategy in the final stages of the 1955-75 Vietnam War.

Le Duc Tho refused the prize on the grounds peace had not yet been established. Two of the five committee members resigned in protest.

Kissinger, while accepting the award, did not travel to Norway for the ceremony and later tried in vain to return the prize.

Internal documents released in 2023 showed the then-committee gave the award in the full knowledge the Vietnam War was unlikely to end any time soon.

AUNG SAN SUU KYI

One of the few women to win the award, Suu Kyi was one of a string of human rights campaigners in the 1990s to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, for her non-violent struggle for democracy against the military dictatorship in Myanmar.

For years she was hailed as one of the best recipients of the award, but that changed after the Myanmar military in 2017 carried out mass killings and gang rapes “with genocidal intent” against the Rohingya Muslim minority, according to a United Nations investigation.

Suu Kyi, who led Myanmar’s civilian government at the time, has been criticised for failing to speak out against the army crackdown against the Rohingya.

In 2021, following a military coup, Suu Kyi was arrested again. The 80-year-old has been detained ever since and her health is ailing, according to her son.

MAHATMA GANDHI

He was on the committee’s internal discussion list of candidates on five different occasions, with the body prepared to award him in 1948, the year he was assassinated, according to Lundestad.

The committee could still have given him the prize posthumously – it was possible at the time but no longer is – but did not.

According to Lundestad, it may be because the committee did not want to offend Norway’s close ally Britain, the former colonial power in India, or because the politics of Gandhi may have been perceived as too “foreign” or “anti-modern” by members of a Europe-centric committee.

The violence of India’s partition could also have played a part, he said. At least 1 million people were killed and 15 million were uprooted.

In any case, “among the omissions, Mahatma Gandhi stands in a class of his own”, wrote Lundestad in his memoir. “It is of course extremely unfortunate that the 20th century’s leading spokesman for non-violence never received the Nobel Peace Prize.”