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The Nobel Peace Prize today stands at a crossroads between moral aspiration and geopolitical performance. Using the Dominion vs Dharma framework, this essay argues that the Prize’s prestige in the 21st century depends on whether it continues to legitimate coercive “peace”—sanctions, militarised diplomacy, and externally driven regime change—or re-centres its moral purpose on justice and balance. Drawing on CodePink’s critique of the nomination of Venezuelan politician María Corina Machado, the essay examines how Dominion has captured the language of peace and proposes a Dharmic reorientation rooted in transparency, plurality, and moral humility. It concludes that India’s civilisational heritage offers the conceptual resources for restoring meaning to global institutions of peace.
1. Peace and Its Discontents
In October 2025, the activist collective CodePink published an open letter warning that the Nobel Peace Prize had “lost its meaning.” Their concern stemmed from reports that Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado was being seriously considered for the 2025 Prize despite her history of endorsing foreign sanctions and political destabilisation. The episode, while local in appearance, symbolises a larger crisis: has the Nobel Peace Prize become an instrument of power rather than conscience?
For over a century, the Nobel has served as the moral currency of the modern world. Yet its history also mirrors the world’s hierarchies—who gets to define peace, who deserves recognition, and who is rendered invisible. Beneath its universalist rhetoric lies a tension between two civilisational logics: Dominion, the pursuit of control through hierarchy and coercion; and Dharma, the pursuit of balance through moral order and mutual flourishing.
2. Dominion and Dharma: Competing Moral Grammars
Dominion represents the worldview that has dominated global politics since the Age of Discovery: the conviction that peace can be imposed by power, that order requires control, and that history moves forward through conquest and discipline. It is the theology of empire reborn in secular form—the same logic that justified colonialism, Cold-War intervention, and the militarisation of humanitarianism.
Dharma, by contrast, arises from the Indian civilisational imagination as the principle that sustains harmony in a plural universe. It demands right relationship rather than right domination. In a Dharmic frame, peace is not merely the absence of conflict but the presence of justice, restraint, and inner equilibrium. It is a state of alignment between power and conscience.
3. The Political Economy of Virtue
To understand this slippage, we must examine what might be called the political economy of virtue. Alfred Nobel’s will endowed his prizes to honour those who “confer the greatest benefit on mankind.” Yet the Nobel Committee’s deliberations remain opaque, shaped by Nordic elites embedded within trans-Atlantic power circuits. Over time, the Peace Prize has often mirrored Western geopolitical anxieties: recognising dissidents from socialist states while overlooking victims of Western wars; applauding symbolic gestures by powerful actors while neglecting the quiet labour of reconciliation in the Global South.
The 1973 Prize jointly awarded to Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho epitomised this paradox: a war architect sharing a peace medal with his adversary. Tho declined the award; Kissinger accepted it and continued the bombing of Cambodia. Each such episode chips away at the Prize’s moral foundation, turning peace into spectacle.
4. The Capture of Conscience
In the 21st century, Dominion has become subtler. Military interventions are now justified as “responsibility to protect.” Economic blockades are reframed as “smart sanctions.” Information warfare is recast as “strategic communication.” Through such euphemisms, coercion cloaks itself in virtue.
Institutions like the Nobel Committee face intense pressure to align with this moral vocabulary of power. Each selection operates as a symbolic referendum on global order: rewarding one narrative while silencing another. The Committee’s tendency to celebrate state-aligned reformers or corporate philanthropists, while marginalising indigenous peacebuilders and non-Western voices, reveals how Dominion defines even the boundaries of moral imagination.
5. India and the Moral Geography of Peace
India occupies a unique position in this moral geography. From Ashoka’s edicts to Gandhi’s ahimsa, the subcontinent has long articulated an alternative grammar of power: restraint, dialogue, and spiritual accountability. Yet in the current geopolitical milieu, India too wrestles with the temptation of Dominion—projecting itself as a rising power through military and technological prowess rather than through moral leadership.
The question therefore is not whether India can win more Nobel Prizes, but whether it can redefine peace for a world in transition. As the West’s moral authority wanes—undermined by wars waged in the name of democracy and markets—the Global South must evolve its own frameworks of legitimacy. Dharma offers such a framework: one that integrates inner consciousness with external justice.
About Author:
Vivek Singhal is an engineer, management consultant, and author of Dominion and Dharma: Reframing Capitalism through Conquest, Consciousness, and Civilisational Memory (2025). He writes on geopolitics, civilisational ethics, and the moral foundations of the emerging phygital age.
