Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images 
 
 There’s no shortage of awards and prizes out there for diplomacy, peacemaking, and humanitarian achievement. But for whatever reason, the one that will be handed out this Friday, bestowed by a committee selected by the Norwegian parliament in honor of the man who invented dynamite, is considered the most important and most deserving of media attention. 
 
 Joshua Keating Joshua Keating is a staff writer at Slate focusing on international affairs and author of the forthcoming book, Invisible Countries. 
 
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 This year the prize committee could best serve its mission by giving the prize to the person who most deserves it: nobody. Such a move would highlight that this has been a particularly violent year around the world. More importantly, it would serve as an acknowledgment that the most notable eruptions of violence have been so grimly predictable, the result of years of individual and collective failures by governments and international institutions. 
 
 While the emergence of ISIS and the disintegration of Iraq and Syria have taken place at alarming speed, these were less sudden explosions than the climaxes of crises that have been worsening for years. There’s a lot of blame to go around here, to the governments involved and those that intervened from the outside. But it shouldn’t be surprising that an unchecked civil war in Syria and years of shortsighted sectarian governance in Iraq would lead to a situation like this. 
 
 The United States, and former Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama, will not win any awards for peace promotion this year. In 2009, Obama raised eyebrows in Oslo by using his Nobel acceptance speech to make the argument that there are times when the use of force by governments in the name of preserving overall peace and stability is “not only necessary but morally justified.” Five years later it’s harder to make the case that the world has become more peaceful as a result of the judicious deployment of American violence. A global drone war may have decimated al-Qaida, but its local franchises and splinter groups are as potent as ever. NATO airpower ousted a tyrant in Libya but left a chaotic power vacuum in his place. 
 
 The breakup of the Soviet Union is justifiably seen today as a major advance for the cause of peace and human freedom. Mikhail Gorbachev deservedly received the Peace Prize during the final days of the Soviet empire in 1990. But this year’s crisis in Ukraine showed that everything is not hunky-dory in the former USSR. For the first time in decades, a European border was redrawn by force, and the international community was exposed as utterly unable to stop it from happening. Ukraine has been invaded by Russia without Moscow admitting anything of the sort, though Ukraine’s own government doesn’t have entirely clean hands either. 
 
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 More than 2,000 people, most of them civilians, died in Gaza and Israel over the summer, the latest in a recurring cycle of violence in which both sides seem increasingly indifferent to casualties and fail to recognize their own long-term interests. (Nobel Prizes have been awarded for that peace process, too.) 
 
 This was the year that the international media finally, if briefly, started paying attention to Boko Haram’s campaign of terror in northern Nigeria. (Nigeria actually led the world in terrorism fatalities in the first half of 2014.) But that conflict’s been developing for a long while as well. The world’s newest country, South Sudan—a darling of the international aid community, not to mention George Clooney—also collapsed into a civil war that seemed inevitable since its founding. 
 
 This was the year that three countries in West Africa were devastated by a disease that would probably have been containable if decades of civil war and kleptocratic rule hadn’t left those countries with threadbare public health systems and populations understandably suspicious of those in power. 
 
 And this was the year that we learned that the side with tear gas, truncheons, and pepper spray gets to decide what “one country, two systems” really means. 
 
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 I don’t think the world is a hopeless maelstrom of violence. Good things have happened in the past 12 months as well. Three of the world’s five largest countries—India, Indonesia, and this week, Brazil—are holding democratic elections, and there’s been major progress on containing AIDS and tuberculosis, which are among the world’s deadliest diseases. 
 
 Even so, it’s hard to find anyone deserving of a Peace Prize in 2014. The original purpose of the Nobel Peace Prize was to reward the person who “shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” And on that score, there was not much to report this year. 
 
 The committee should follow the example of the Mo Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership, the world’s most generous prize given to individuals, with an outlay of $5 million over 10 years plus $200,000 per annum after that. The prize has simply not been granted in three of the six years it has existed because no suitable candidates were found. This has served the prize’s goal—highlighting and compensating former African heads of state who governed well while in office and stepped down when they were supposed to—better than watering down the criteria. 
 
 The Nobel Peace Prize was not awarded on 19 occasions, including for most of the duration of the two world wars. The most recent year in which the prize wasn’t granted was 1972. If the prize doesn’t get handed out, the monetary award (about $1.1 million) “shall be reserved until the following year,” according to the Nobel website. 
 
 Some of the names up for discussion this year are quite deserving. Malala Yousafzai, who has promoted the education of girls in rural Pakistan in the face of Taliban violence, and Denis Mukwege, who has advocated on behalf of victims of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, are both doing remarkable work. And I certainly don’t mean to denigrate the efforts of the many activists, aid workers, and officials working for peace in difficult circumstances around the world. ||||| Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images 
 
 Earlier this week, I argued that the Nobel Peace Prize should go to nobody, “as an acknowledgment that the most notable eruptions of violence have been so grimly predictable, the result of years of individual and collective failures by governments and international institutions.” Despite that sentiment, I certainly don’t object to the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s decision to award this year’s prize to Malala Yousafzai and Kailash Satyarthi for, as the announcement put it, “their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education.” 
 
 Joshua Keating Joshua Keating is a staff writer at Slate focusing on international affairs. 
 
 The most surprising thing about the award may be how unsurprising it is. The last few peace prizes—particularly the ones given to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons last year, the EU in 2012, and Barack Obama in 2009—have been unexpected curveballs. Yousafzai, by contrast, was mentioned as a strong favorite in nearly every story leading up to Friday’s prize announcement. 
 
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 Satyarthi, a 60-year-old campaigner against child labor in India, is much less well-known. He’s known for mounting raids on factories employing children—sometimes facing down armed guards—as well as running a rehabilitation center for liberated children, organizing the Global March Against Child Labour, and setting up a certification system to ensure that carpets are made without child labor. 
 
 While Yousafzai and Satyarthi are both admirable and inspiring figures, I think it’s worth stepping back and assessing the Nobel committee’s mission. In its early years, the Nobel Peace Prize was most often given to honor a specific accomplishment in peacemaking—a treaty drafted or a conflict ended. (This is why some individuals not exactly known for their pacifism—Yasser Arafat and Henry Kissinger to name a couple—have peace prizes.) But overall, it’s more often been given to individuals involved in the struggle against a particular pressing problem or injustice. (Think Al Gore or Aung San Suu Kyi.) This year is obviously an example of this second type of prize. 
 
 While the (somewhat inexplicable) prestige of the Nobel can certainly bring attention to worthy individuals, there’s less evidence to suggest it helps their causes. For instance, the prize given to human rights activist Liu Xiaobo in 2010 has probably made it less likely that Chinese authorities will let him out of prison. 
 
 Some also find the western media’s fascination with Yousafzai a little troubling. When she was passed over for the prize last year, blogger and technology researcher Zeynep Tufekci argued in a widely read post that in the Malala narrative “our multi-decade involvement in Pakistan is reduced to finding a young woman we admire that we all want to take home as if to put on a shelf to adore.” Whereas, she continued, “what the world is desperately lacking, and the Nobel Committee, for once, rewarded, is the kind of boring, institutional work of peace that advances the lives of people.” 
 
 There is something irritatingly smug and condescending about some of the coverage of “the bravest girl in the world.” It was a particular low point when, on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart said “I want to adopt you” to a young woman who’s spoken very publicly about the support she’s received from her father—a pretty brave guy in his own right. 
 
 But that’s our problem, not hers. My guess is that someone’s who’s comfortable telling the president of the United States to his face that his military policies are fueling terrorism isn’t going to let herself be reduced to a cuddly caricature. And in any case, it was probably wise for the Nobel committee to pair the very young global celebrity with a relatively unheralded activist with years of work behind him. 
 
 The committee gave its last two awards to institutions—the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and the European Union—and not particularly popular ones at that. In a year in which governments and international institutions seemed particularly ineffectual in dealing with mounting violence and instability, giving the award to individuals seems appropriate. Dividing the peace prize between an Indian and a Pakistani also seems like a deliberate statement at a time when tensions are once again escalating between the perennial adversaries.
– The culmination of Nobel week comes on Friday, when the Nobel Prize for Peace is handed to ... no one, hopes Joshua Keating. In a column for Slate, Keating writes that in the past, and "at its best," the award has shone a spotlight on important issues—like climate change in 2007, and women's right four years later. But it's not just that 2014 has been a pretty deadly year around our planet (think: ISIS, Boko Haram, Ukraine, etc.). There's an issue at hand: "The most notable eruptions of violence have been so grimly predictable, the result of years of individual and collective failures by governments and international institutions," he writes. Giving the award to nobody would be an "acknowledgment" of that. No handing out the award also wouldn't be a first. It most recently happened in 1972, marking the 19th time it wasn't bestowed on anyone (WWI and WWII years didn't see a lot of Peace prizes being doled out). Keating does acknowledge that some of the names being floated are by no means unworthy: There's Malala Yousafzai, along with Congolese doctor Denis Mukwege, who has done much for his country's many gang-rape victims. "But if the committee really wants to send a powerful message to world leaders after a not-so-peaceful year, there's only one way to do that," concludes Keating. "Give one of the world’s most famous awards to absolutely no one." Read his full column at Slate.