Who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2023 ?

Question

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Correct — A, Narges Mohammadi. The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize 2023 to Narges Mohammadi, in the Committee's own words, 'for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all'. She was born on 21 April 1972 at Zanjan in Iran, and she was in Evin prison in Tehran when the award was announced, so she could neither receive the news in person nor travel to Oslo — her children accepted the prize and read her lecture on her behalf. The award came a year after the nationwide protests that followed the death in custody of Mahsa Amini in September 2022, and the citation's phrasing ties it directly to the position of women in Iran. What makes this question answerable even without the 2023 headline is that every other name on the list is a real laureate of a clearly different year, and each of those years has its own equally famous citation. Once you can attach a year to each of the four, the question solves itself by elimination, and no two of them can be confused because no two share a cause. Note also the Iranian pattern the Committee has twice recognised: Shirin Ebadi, a lawyer and human-rights activist, had won in 2003 — a fact UPSC itself has asked — making Narges Mohammadi the second Iranian woman honoured with this prize, twenty years later.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) A laureate of 2021, not 2023. The Nobel Peace Prize 2021 was awarded jointly to Maria Ressa and Dmitry Andreyevich Muratov 'for their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace' — she a Filipino journalist and co-founder of Rappler, he the editor of Russia's Novaya Gazeta. The theme is press freedom, not the position of women.  (c) A laureate of 2018. The prize that year went jointly to Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad 'for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict'. Murad is a Yazidi survivor of Islamic State captivity in Iraq; the shared subject of women's rights makes her the most confusable name here, but the year and the citation are different.  (d) A laureate of 2019 — awarded to Abiy Ahmed Ali, then Prime Minister of Ethiopia, 'for his efforts to achieve peace and international cooperation, and in particular for his decisive initiative to resolve the border conflict with neighbouring Eritrea'. That is a head-of-government peace-treaty award, a different category of Peace Prize altogether from a human-rights activist's.

Concept: The Nobel Peace Prize is the odd one out among the Nobel Prizes in two structural ways worth knowing. First, while the prizes in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine and literature are decided in Sweden, the Peace Prize is decided by a five-member committee appointed by the Norwegian Parliament and is awarded in Oslo, not Stockholm — an arrangement laid down in Alfred Nobel's own will. Second, it is the only Nobel that may go to an organisation as well as to a person, which is why the International Committee of the Red Cross, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons and the World Food Programme are all laureates. Prizes may be shared by up to three individuals. The Peace Prize also runs closest to current events, which is why it is the Nobel that examinations ask about most: it responds to the year's politics — a protest movement, a war, a treaty — in a way the science prizes, which usually reward work done decades earlier, do not.

State PCS 2025 Q63 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q63 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer