The Nobel peace prize has little to do with the 'real' Nobel prizes or Nobel committee. It's administered by an entirely different organization, in a different country and with different rules and criteria.
> It's administered by an entirely different organization, in a different country and with different rules and criteria.
This part is true, but that's because Nobel explicitly specified it this way. The peace prize is one of the original "real" ones. As opposed to the one for economics, which was made up later by others.
(And, well, that contributions to world peace are judged by "different rules and criteria" than physics... makes some sense.)
You're right that a basic failure here is the way the prize was set up. Unlike the Chemistry, Physics, Physiology or Medicine, and Literature prizes, which are awarded by actual practitioners in those fields, the peace prize is awarded by whatever 5 people the Norwegian Parliament selects that year. Neither these people nor the Parliament selecting them necessarily have anything to do with "work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses", unfortunately. As a result, they don't seem to have quite as strong an incentive to make good choices, on either a personal or institutional level, as the selection processes for the other Nobel prizes.
I think this difference in _who_ is doing the awarding and how they are related to the people receiving the awards is what dagw was trying to get at above. It's the difference between experts in a field selecting prizes for other members of their field and democratically-elected politicians playing political football with prizes in a field they themselves are totally not involved in and likely not much interested in to start with. :(
Chemistry, physics, physiology and medicine are sciences that have practitioners. Literature is an art that has practitioners. But peace is not a science nor an art. Nevertheless, Alfred Nobel saw fit to set up the peace prize. The rumor is that he did this because of hurt feelings after being accused of profiting from munitions manufacturing (he made his fortunes through inventions in explosives).
Of course there is a difference in who is doing the awarding. Nobel's decision to give the prize-awarding responsibility to Norwegian parliament might have had something to do with knowing peace activists at the time when Sweden and Norway were approaching the dissolution of their union, and there was fear of war.
I can't really point out any significantly better subject matter experts in working for peace than Norwegian Parliament.
You may be right that at the time there were no better subject matter experts. That doesn't make the Norwegian Parliament any good as subject matter experts in perpetuity, unfortunately, and I think the spotty history of the Peace Prize awards and the resulting disdain for it is evidence of that. Not least because the priorities of both the electorate and their elected representatives can change. So we certainly have evidence of failure; it's not clear whether the failure could have been avoided.
In hindsight, it _may_ have been a good idea to have a process in place for handing off to a better-suited body at some point (e.g. past prize recipients, the UN). Hard to say, of course.
No, I trust the Norwegian parliament and its assigned panel a lot more. Nobel Peace Prize and its reputation is theirs. So far they've done a decent job, even if some of the appointments - like the premature selection of Obama - are disappointing.
All of the Nobel prizes are awarded by entirely different organizations except for Physics and Chemistry. The Nobel peace prize was established by Nobel's will exactly like the other Nobel prizes. It has just as much claim to being a real Nobel prize as any of the other Nobel prizes.
