The Japanese organization Nihon Hidankyo was named on Friday, October 11, the winner of the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the Nobel Institute in Oslo. The movement, which brings together survivors of the nuclear bombs dropped by the United States on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, was rewarded for its actions aimed at bearing witness “Because nuclear weapons must never be used again.” “It is very worrying that today the taboo on the use of nuclear weapons is under pressure”the commission also writes in the press release transmitting the announcement.
The prize was awarded against the backdrop of a litany of crises: wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, famines in Sudan and even omnipresent climate dangers. According to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, the planet will have 59 armed conflicts in 2023, almost double that of 2009. Although some experts see this as a reason not to award a peace prize this year as was done on 19 occasions throughout its history. , the Norwegian Nobel committee considers that such a context, on the contrary, makes its attribution “Perhaps more important than ever”.
“It’s hard to be optimistic when you look at the world today. The peacekeepers do not seem to be on the offensive »Nobel committee secretary Olav Njølstad told Agence France-Presse before the award. “But (…) it is undeniable that there are people and organizations that do excellent work”he stressed.
Last year, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize was the Iranian activist Narges Mohammadi, imprisoned in her country for her fight against the mandatory wearing of the veil for women and against the death penalty.
This year, the medicine prize went to Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for their discovery of microRNAs, a new class of tiny RNA molecules; The physics prize went to the British-Canadian Geoffrey Hinton and the American John Hopfield, who, while working on the“machine learning” crucial for the development of AI, sound the alarm that this technology could become uncontrollable, according to them.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to the American David Baker and the duo formed by another American, John Jumper, and the British Demis Hassabis for having revealed the secrets of proteins, relying on AI and computing.
The only female and non-Western presence so far, South Korean author Han Kang received the Nobel Prize for Literature. As for the economics prize, added in 1969 to the original Nobel Prize, the ball will close on Monday, October 14.
