Norwegian MP Nominates The Black Lives Matter Movement for 2021 Nobel Peace Prize

Black Lives Matter, the largest Civil Rights movement in U.S. history, is internationally recognized for its impact.

Black Lives Matter protests swept the nation last summer in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, and not a year later the movement is being nominated for the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize. Despite being founded domestically and intended to address the United States’ history of racial injustice, the Nobel Peace Prize recognition comes from Norweigan MP Peter Eide. In his nomination papers Eide emphasizes the global impact of The Black Lives Matter movement, citing its international influence as a source of systemic change abroad.

Eide told The Guardian, “Black Lives Matter has become a very important worldwide movement to fight racial injustice. They have had a tremendous achievement in raising global awareness and consciousness.” Often left out of domestic racial injustice narratives is the fact that the U.S. is not the only country with a history of anit-Black racism. Eide’s nomination comes with the acknowledgment of inequality based conflict “in Europe and Asia.” The Norweigan politician hopes that the nomination will not be seen as commentary on U.S. politics.

Protestors in Whitehall, London on June 7th of 2020.

In 2013 The Black Lives Matter movement was founded online by community organizers Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi through the hashtag #blacklivesmatter. The co-founders initial calls to action on Facebook came in response to the acquittal of George Zimmeriman in the shooting of Treyvon Martin and garnered national recognition on the Internet. In 2014 the movement’s reach expanded following headlining protests reacting to the murders of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. It wasn’t until the deaths of Breyona Taylor and George Floyd in 2020, though, that Black Lives Matter reached a global audience.

Since its inception, the movement has been falsely alleged as violent by its American opposition, who took to flooding Eide’s email with angry remarks this past weekend according to USA Today. However Eide told the news outlet he was prepared for this reaction, stating: “those arguments also came up when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964—exactly the same arguments.” The arguments he refers to claim that Black Lives Matter is in fact not peaceful. This is contrary to the September 2020 report by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project (ACLED), an organization dedicated to tracking global political violence, which stated that 93 percent of more than 7,750 demonstrations were in fact peaceful.

Alicia Garza, one co-founder of The Black Lives Matter movement and fellow activists.

Considering the overwhelming amount of force-based interference BLM protests have received, these numbers should impress. Unfortunately the Trump administration, right-wing conservative politicians, and U.S. news media have painted an innaccurate picture of Black Lives Matter—a picture similar to the resistance Dr. King faced while leading the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, as Eide mentioned.

Democratic politician and voting rights activist Stacey Abrams also received a nomination this year. Abrams has been widely recognized for her efforts to fight voter suppression and register residents of Georgia to vote in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Many credit her for flipping the historically red state blue, and securing President Joe Biden's win.

On the other side of the aisle, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and deputy Avi Berkowitz have received a Nobel Peace Prize nomination from American attorney Alan Dershowitz, for their role negotiating the “Abraham Accords,” a set of four normalization deals between Israel and Arab nations. Dershowitz, who acted as Trump’s defence lawyer in his first impeachment trial was eligible to place the nomination as a professor emeritus of Harvard Law School. Trump himself was up for a nomination for the same works by far-right Norweigan MP Christian Tybring-Gjedde, but following the Capital riot of January 6, 2021, MP Eide was quoted by The Guardian saying Tybring-Gjedde would have “a little difficulty defending that nomination.”

Past winners of the Nobel Peace Prize include President Barack Obama, for his international diplomatic efforts, and the Pakistani activist for girls' education Malala Yousafzi, who was the youngest recipient in history. This year's laureate will be announced in October and the Nobel Peace Prize Award Ceremony will take place December 10, 2021.