Why you shouldn’t worry about Putin’s Nobel Peace Prize nomination

Earlier today, news broke that Russian President Vladimir Putin was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, because apparently the world is a ball of whirling irony and madness. So how pissed off should we be about this?

The answer: moderately pissed, but we probably shouldn’t be too worried that he’d actually win it. According to the Nobel Prize’s website — specifically, the one page about nominations and such — getting a nomination isn’t quite as difficult as you’d think. Here’s a list of people and groups who may nominate someone for a Nobel Prize:

• Members of national assemblies and governments of states
• Members of international courts
• University rectors; professors of social sciences, history, philosophy, law and theology; directors of peace research institutes and foreign policy institutes
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• Persons who have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
• Board members of organizations that have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
• Active and former members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee; (proposals by members of the Committee to be submitted no later than at the first meeting of the Committee after February 1)
• Former advisers to the Norwegian Nobel Committee )

So as you can see, the range of people who can nominate someone for a Nobel Peace Prize is actually wider than you’d think. But who knows? Perhaps this International Academy of Spiritual Unity and Cooperation of Peoples of the World might have a fair bit of sway when it comes to their vote?

Feel free to look them up. Sift through page after page of Google results, and the only time they’re ever mentioned is in relation to their nomination of Putin. So that’s something.

So what can we take away from this? Putin’s nomination probably isn’t actually indicative of anything. Hell, considering they just opened the floor to nominations, I don’t think anything can be seen as indicative at this point. It’s stupid that Putin was nominated to begin with, but we can dial the worry back from “serious threat” to “unlikely but still somewhat concerning.”