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... Read More