For all minds fixated on the 2017 Nobel peace prize, the favoured banker would be the 2015 Iran deal. The 2015 nuclear disarmament deal covered a major milestone in stabilising peace and ensuring an anti-nuclear Iran. But from the back burner, a campaign group seeking a global ban on nuclear arms impressed the Norwegian Nobel Committee well enough to bag the much coveted Peace prize.
The campaign group, Inter Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, was officially launched in Vienna in 2007 and is a coalition of non-government groups in over 100 countries.
The general tradition for the Nobel committee is to award the prize to either an individual or an official organisation not a global civil society movement set up a decade ago with a recent UN ratification for its treaty on banning nuclear weapons.
The Nobel committee rarely engages with nuclear issues and an exception before 1995 was the Pugwash conferences, an organization set up by Betrand Russell and Joseph Rotblat to promote Einstein's deathbed warning against the bomb.
The decision of the Nobel committee in awarding the campaign group is safer, especially in an era of political disengagement. History also lay an array of previous individual laureates ranging from disappointing to astonishing.
Shrin Ebadi, the only Iranian laureate so far is forced to live in exile. This might substantiate the committee's reluctance to award Iran for its role in the 2015 nuclear deal.
As reported by Reuters, Asle Sveen an historian for the Nobel peace prize said:
I think the committee has thought about the human right situation in Iran. It would have been difficult to explain the prize even though it has a favourable view of the Iran deal.
The prize seeks to reinforce disarmament amid the nuclear tension between Washington and Pyongyang and play safe amid the uncertainty of the fate of the 2015 nuclear deal.
Meanwhile ICAN's executive director, Beatrice Fihn, mentioned that
Nuclear weapons are illegal. Threatening to use nuclear weapons is illegal. Having nuclear weapons, developing nuclear weapon, is illegal, and they need to stop.
The Norwegian Nobel committee also hope that the prize will help diffuse existing nuclear tension and set the world on a path of nuclear disarmament.