By Vivek Singhal, Founder and CEO Strategic Enterprise Administration Co. (Writer of Dominion and Dharma)
The Nobel Peace Prize immediately stands at a crossroads between ethical aspiration and geopolitical efficiency.
Utilizing the Dominion vs Dharma framework, this essay argues that the Prize’s status within the twenty first century is determined by whether or not it continues to reputable coercive “peace”—sanctions, militarised diplomacy, and externally pushed regime change—or re-centres its ethical function on justice and stability.
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 ethical humility.
It concludes that India’s civilisational heritage affords the conceptual sources for restoring which means to international establishments of peace.
1. Peace and Its Discontents
In October 2025, the activist collective CodePink revealed an open letter warning that the Nobel Peace Prize had “misplaced its which means.”
Their concern stemmed from studies that Venezuelan opposition chief María Corina Machado was being severely thought-about for the 2025 Prize regardless of her historical past of endorsing overseas sanctions and political destabilisation.
The episode, whereas native in look, symbolises a bigger disaster: has the Nobel Peace Prize turn out to be an instrument of energy moderately than conscience?
For over a century, the Nobel has served because the ethical forex of the trendy world. But its historical past additionally mirrors the world’s hierarchies—who will get to outline peace, who deserves recognition, and who’s rendered invisible.
Beneath its universalist rhetoric lies a stress between two civilisational logics: Dominion, the pursuit of management by way of hierarchy and coercion; and Dharma, the pursuit of stability by way of ethical order and mutual flourishing.
2. Dominion and Dharma: Competing Ethical Grammars
Dominion represents the worldview that has dominated international politics because the Age of Discovery: the conviction that peace will be imposed by energy, that order requires management, and that historical past strikes ahead by way of conquest and self-discipline.
It’s the theology of empire reborn in secular type—the identical logic that justified colonialism, Chilly-Warfare intervention, and the militarisation of humanitarianism.
Dharma, against this, arises from the Indian civilisational creativeness because the precept that sustains concord in a plural universe.
It calls for proper relationship moderately than proper domination. In a Dharmic body, peace isn’t merely the absence of battle however the presence of justice, restraint, and interior equilibrium. It’s a state of alignment between energy and conscience.
3. The Political Financial system of Advantage
To grasp this slippage, we should study what is likely to be referred to as the political economic system of advantage. Alfred Nobel’s will endowed his prizes to honour those that “confer the best profit on mankind.”
But the Nobel Committee’s deliberations stay opaque, formed by Nordic elites embedded inside trans-Atlantic energy circuits.
Over time, the Peace Prize has typically mirrored Western geopolitical anxieties: recognising dissidents from socialist states whereas overlooking victims of Western wars; applauding symbolic gestures by highly effective actors whereas neglecting the quiet labour of reconciliation within the World South.
The 1973 Prize collectively awarded to Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho epitomised this paradox: a warfare architect sharing a peace medal together with his adversary.
Tho declined the award; Kissinger accepted it and continued the bombing of Cambodia. Every such episode chips away on the Prize’s ethical basis, turning peace into spectacle.
4. The Seize of Conscience
Within the twenty first century, Dominion has turn out to be subtler. Navy interventions at the moment are justified as “duty to guard.” Financial blockades are reframed as “sensible sanctions.” Info warfare is recast as “strategic communication.” By means of such euphemisms, coercion cloaks itself in advantage.
Establishments just like the Nobel Committee face intense strain to align with this ethical vocabulary of energy. Every choice operates as a symbolic referendum on international order: rewarding one narrative whereas silencing one other.
The Committee’s tendency to have fun state-aligned reformers or company philanthropists, whereas marginalising indigenous peacebuilders and non-Western voices, reveals how Dominion defines even the boundaries of ethical creativeness.
5. India and the Ethical Geography of Peace
India occupies a novel place on this ethical geography. From Ashoka’s edicts to Gandhi’s ahimsa, the subcontinent has lengthy articulated an alternate grammar of energy: restraint, dialogue, and non secular accountability.
But within the present geopolitical milieu, India too wrestles with the temptation of Dominion—projecting itself as a rising energy by way of army and technological prowess moderately than by way of ethical management.
The query subsequently isn’t whether or not India can win extra Nobel Prizes, however whether or not it may possibly redefine peace for a world in transition.
Because the West’s ethical authority wanes—undermined by wars waged within the title of democracy and markets—the World South should evolve its personal frameworks of legitimacy. Dharma affords such a framework: one which integrates interior consciousness with exterior justice.
About Writer:
Vivek Singhal is an engineer, administration marketing consultant, and writer of Dominion and Dharma: Reframing Capitalism by way of Conquest, Consciousness, and Civilisational Reminiscence (2025). He writes on geopolitics, civilisational ethics, and the ethical foundations of the rising phygital age.
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