The 2025 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to Maria Corina Machado from Venezuela. Peter Wallensteen is the Richard G. Starmann, Sr. Research Professor Emeritus of Peace Studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, part of the Keough School of Global Affairs, and Senior Professor in the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Sweden’s Uppsala University. He offers comments on this year's award below:
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has awarded the Peace Prize for 2025 to the 58-year old engineer and political activist Maria Corina Machado from Venezuela for ”her tireless work promoting democratic rights” and her commitment to ”a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship” in her country. It is also underlined that she is an ”extraordinary example of civilian courage.” None of this can be disputed. Machado’s life is marked by dramatic events as part of her two-decades long and innovative struggle, including convincingly demonstrating how the Venezuelan government rigged the election results in 2024.
The Committee argues that this award meets all of the criteria in Alfred Nobel’s will. Machado’s work focuses a democratic transition of government in Venezuela, and she has served as a ”unifying” force for the opposition. The Committee states that democracy is a prerequisite ”for lasting peace.” This, of course, has been demonstrated in much research, although there are limits to the number of problems that can be solved only by democratic means.
In todays’s world peaceful change is important and requires support not the least by existing democracies. It is noteworthy that Maria Corina Machado was nominated by a number of Republican U.S. Senators in August 2024, including the present Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has also congratulated her in April 2025 after her nomination to Time 100.
The prize is in a way connecting to U.S. foreign policy, with its criticism of Venezuela’s present regime. At the same time it points to the independence and integrity of the Nobel Committee. The present ceasefire in Gaza, its origin and what is to follow are issues the Committee, deftly, leaves for the 2026 prize discussions.