The Norwegian Nobel Committee bases its assessment on valid nominations that they receive by 1 February each year.  The members of the committee can also nominate candidates before their first meeting after the deadline.  In total, 197 nominees, 164 individuals and 33 organizations, have been nominated for the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize. This year, the prize will be announced on Friday, October 10 at 11:00 am (Norwegian time).

The PRIO Director thinks that the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize is likely to be awarded to someone who has been active in defending human rights.  This is because the Nobel Committee may see the symbolic significance of presenting the prize to such a candidate at the award ceremony on 10 December, as this day also happens to mark the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. If the prize goes to a human rights activist, the most likely candidates are the Chinese dissident Hu Jia, the Vietnamese Buddhist Thich (monk) Quang Do, and Lidia Yusupova.

The Director’s own nominee

In a change of tradition, the PRIO Director has, for the first time, decided to nominate someone for the Nobel Peace Prize on his own initiative. Respecting the Nobel Committee's request that nominators refrain from publishing their proposals, the PRIO Director's own "favourite" for the prize is not included in the list below, and will not be publicised, but is someone directly engaged in conflict prevention and peace-related activities.

The PRIO Director's speculations for the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize are:

1. Hu Jia
2. Thich Quang Do
3. Lidia Yusupova
4. The Cluster Munitions Coalition (CMC)
5. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)

Hu Jia

Chinese activist and dissident, focusing on democracy, the environment and HIV/AIDS. In April 2008, he was sentenced to 3.5 years in jail for "inciting subversion of state power and the socialist system" (a crime for which he pleaded not guilty).  One might think that he, and other Chinese dissidents vocal in the foreign press (Rebiya Kadeer, Gao Zhisheng), have been harassed or locked away to silence criticism of the Chinese government in the run up to the Beijing Olympics.  The only Chinese who has ever been given the peace prize is the Dalai Lama (1989). The Nobel Committee must have long been looking for good Chinese candidates. If the Nobel Committee should have felt a need to avoid offending the People’s Republic of China in the years preceding the Beijing Olympics, the time may be seen as ripe now to award the prize to a Chinese human rights activist just after the 2008 Olympic Games.

Thich Quang Do

If the Nobel Committee does not wish to give the prize to a Chinese activist and dissident, they may choose to give it to a Vietnamese. Thich Quang Do is a Buddhist monk, religious leader, researcher, writer and critic of the Vietnamese government and one of Vietnam’s most prominent dissidents. He has spent more than 25 years in detention for his peaceful advocacy of religious freedom, democracy and human rights and is currently detained at the Thanh Minh Zen Monastery in Saigon. In 2006 Quang Do received the Norwegian Rafto prize, and has been nominated for the Nobel peace prize many times.

Lidia Yusupova

Human rights lawyer and spokeswoman for the forgotten victims of the war in Chechnya, Lidia Yusupova gathers testimonies from victims of human rights abuses, and presses their cases with law enforcement and military agencies. She is also the coordinator of the law office at Memorial, a human rights organization based in Moscow. Yusupova received the Norwegian Rafto prize in 2005. Giving the price to a Russian dissident would also give the Nobel committee a chance to evoke the memory of Anna Politkovskaja, the Russian journalist, author and peace activist who was murdered 7 October 2006.

The Cluster Munitions Coalition (CMC)

The Cluster Munitions Coalition (CMC) is an international coalition of some 300 NGOs that has, since 2003, campaigned to ban the use, stockpiling, production, and transfer of cluster munitions. This effort met with success in Dublin in May of 2008 as 111 states agreed to a treaty text that prohibits the use of most types of cluster munitions, what has become known as the “Oslo Process.” This agreement will be signed On December 3rd 2008 in Oslo, Norway. Giving the prize to CMC would follow the lead and reasoning the Committee used in 1997, when it awarded the prize to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), arguing that the campaign had significantly contributed to mitigating the detrimental humanitarian effects of landmines, as well as making a positive contribution to disarmament. In this sense, the exact same arguments can be invoked in favor of awarding the prize to CMC. A counter argument, however, is that the role of the CMC may not have been quite as significant as that of the ICBL in 1997, with the process being driven more by states (particularly Norway) than by the campaign itself.

The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)

Between 2007 and 2008 there was a dramatic increase in world food prices. Simultaneously a high rise in agricultural inputs like fertilizers has posed a major obstacle to developing countries’ efforts to increase agricultural production. For many of the 800 million people who are already affected by chronic hunger the price rise can be devastating, and the situation has naturally provoked social unrest in many developing countries. As a response to the situation, FAO in December 2007 launched its Initiative on Soaring Food Prices, to help vulnerable countries implement urgent measures to increase food supplies. The initiative now covers projects in 54 countries worldwide, with vulnerable populations as the main target. Given the severe economic, social and political consequences in poor countries resulting from the rise in food prices, the FAO’s efforts could be seen as crucial for improving the conditions for world peace and security. The Nobel Committee has twice before awarded the prize to someone working to improve food security. This was when John Boyd Orr (the first director of FAO) received the prize in 1949 and Norman Ernest Borlaug, one of the scientists behind “the green revolution”, got it in 1970.

Confirmed Nominations:

Although nominators are requested not to publish their proposals, the following list of nominees is confirmed only to the extent that the nominators have apparently chosen to publicise their choice anyway.

• Thich Quang Do, Deputy Leader of the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam (UBVC), nominated by a wide range of academics and legislators from Europe, the United States and Asia
• Hu Jia, Chinese activist and dissident
• Wei Jingsheng, another Chinese dissident
• Mordechai Vanunu, Israeli former nuclear technician who revealed details of Israel’s nuclear weapons program to the British press in 1986
• Abdelaziz Bouteflika, Algerian President
• Helmut Kohl, former German Chancellor
• Bill Richardson, New Mexico governor and a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations
• Ingrid Betancourt, Colombian politician, former senator and anti-corruption activist, kidnapped by Marxist FARC rebels during her presidential campaign in 2002, and held hostage for six years. Since her release, on 2 July 2008, her popularity has soared, with calls for her to re-enter politics and run for president of Colombia again (and to award her the Nobel Peace Prize - it would appear that Chilean President Michelle Bachelet has nominated her, but probably too late).  The Committee might wish to award the prize to this strong, high-profile, Latin American woman for maintaining, despite her ordeal, that political transformation must happen through peaceful and democratic means, in a country which, we should remind ourselves, suffers heavily from the world's longest running civil war. Ingrid Betancourt has suffered substantial human rights abuse from her captors. Betancourt’s recent comments on the need to talk with terrorists in order to fight terrorism may speak to her advantage.
• Martti Ahtisaari, former Finnish president and now peace negotiator, was a top candidate in 2007 and has been nominated again this year
• Vladimir Putin, Russian President, has been nominated by The International Center for Research on Biofuels and Patents in Zurich for his alternative fuel initiatives in Russia
• Esperanto, the international language, has been nominated by two Swiss members of parliament
• Father John Dear, peacemaker
• Bob Geldof
• The Peace Jam Foundation
• Greenpeace

Possible Nominations:

The following "possible" nominees are not confirmed. Although there is plenty of speculation in some cases, the nominators have not chosen to publicly confirm their nominations.

• Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the Movement for Democratic Change, the majority party in Zimbabwe, withdrew from the second round of elections in June 2008 because of widespread use of violence by Robert Mugabe's regime to frighten the electorate. Although he is more of a traditional political leader than a peace or human rights activist, Tsvangirai's non-violent political activism against the nefarious Mugabe regime makes him a possible candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. With the recent power-sharing agreement between President Mugabe and Tsvangirai, the latter has become Zimbabwe’s new Prime Minister. This does perhaps make it risky to award him the price. We cannot know how his government will be doing. On the other hand, a prize to him would serve as a direct encouragement for a further peaceful regime change in Zimbabwe. 
• Kenya's President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga, possibly with the African Union, for their parts in helping to curb the violence that occurred after the 2007 presidential election by agreeing to share power and implement reforms. The effort made by former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, with a mandate from the African Union and an international team, to persuade the two rivals in Kenya to share power may be hailed as an example of good preventive diplomacy. It is highly debatable, however, that the two rivals deserve the prize, as it remains to be seen how successful the power sharing agreement will be. So it might be a little premature for the Nobel Committee to reward the conflict preventers in Kenya, and the main broker of the power sharing agreement, Kofi Annan, is already a peace prize laureate.
• The European Union (the President of the Norwegian National Assembly, former Prime Minister Thorbjørn Jagland, has for several years promoted the idea of awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to the European Union)Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President, who as President of the European Council mediated between Russia and Georgia after the August 2008 war. However, if he has been nominated, it would be for a different reason, since the nomination deadline was before the Russo-Georgian war.
• Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, spiritual leader and founder of the international Art of Living Foundation
• Pastor Bulambo Lembelembe Josué, church leader and winner of this year’s Rafto prize, for his work for peace in Eastern Congo. More than five million people have lost their lives in the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and hundreds of thousands of women have been raped. Pastor Bulambo Lembelembe has initiated a rehabilitation program for women victims of rape (CAMPS), and a program to help child soldiers. As a church leader he preaches democratic ideals in order to relieve tensions between ethnic groups in the region, and he is the Vice President of the human rights organization Hèritiers de la Justice. Four Rafto laureates; Myanmar's Aung San Suu Kyi, East Timor's Jose Ramos-Horta, South Korea's Kim Dae-Jung, and Iran's Shirin Ebadi, have subsequently also won the Nobel Peace Prize.