The Peace Prize will be announced in Oslo on October 6, the highlight of the week of announcements running from October 2-9.
With the war in Ukraine well into its second year, tensions flaring between superpowers and a slew of African coups in recent years, the global state of affairs is decidedly bleak, say experts.
In a reflection of the frictions, the Russian ambassador's invitation to the Nobel prize banquet in Stockholm in December was recently rescinded following angry protests.
"In many ways it would be appropriate for the committee not to hand out any prize this year," Swedish professor of international affairs Peter Wallensteen told AFP.
"It would be a good way of marking the seriousness of the world situation."
The last time that happened was a half-century ago, in 1972 amid the Vietnam War.
To find no laudable candidate would these days be considered a failure.
"It's very hard to think that this could be the result," the secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee Olav Njolstad told AFP, "but I will not say it's impossible."
"The world really needs something that may point in a good direction. There is every need for the Nobel Peace Prize to be awarded even this year."
The list of nominations is secret, but 351 individuals or organisations are known to be on it.
- Iranian women, Ukraine or climate? -
So who could get the nod?
Some Nobel watchers have pointed to the Iranian women protesting since the death in custody a year ago of Mahsa Amini, arrested for allegedly violating Iran's strict dress code imposed on women.
Activists Masih Alinejad and Narges Mohammadi or the Alliance for Democracy and Freedom in Iran are seen as potential laureates in such case.
Other possibilities are organisations documenting war crimes in Ukraine, or the International Criminal Court, which could one day be called upon to judge them.
Climate activists have also been mentioned, after the hottest summer on record and a year of extreme weather threatening mankind.
"I think that climate change is a really good focus for the Peace Prize this year," Dan Smith, the head of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, told AFP.
He singled out the Fridays for Future movement started by Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, and Brazilian tribal chief Raoni Metuktire, who campaigns against deforestation and for indigenous rights.
Last year, the prize was shared by Russian human rights group Memorial, Ukraine's Center for Civil Liberties and jailed Belarusian rights advocate Ales Bialiatski, all three representing the nations at the centre of the war in Ukraine which they oppose.
The Swedish Academy, meanwhile, is to announce its pick for the Literature Prize in Stockholm on October 5.
Among the names making the rounds in literary circles are Russian author and outspoken Putin critic Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Chinese avant-garde writer Can Xue, British author Salman Rushdie, Caribbean-American writer Jamaica Kincaid and Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse.
- 'Reflect the times' -
The Swedish Academy has often put the spotlight on little-known authors, though last year it went to French feminist icon Annie Ernaux.
She was just the 17th woman to win since the prize was first handed out in 1901.
The Academy has undergone major reforms since a devastating #MeToo scandal in 2018, vowing a more global and gender-equal literature prize.
"In recent years, there is more awareness that you can't remain in a eurocentric perspective, there has to be more equality and the prize has to reflect the times," Stockholm University literature professor Carin Franzen told AFP.
Since the scandal, it has honoured three women -- Ernaux, US poet Louise Gluck and Poland's Olga Tokarczuk -- and two men -- Austrian author Peter Handke and Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah.
The Medicine Prize opens the Nobel season on Monday, with research into cancer-fighting T-cell therapy, the human microbiome and narcolepsy making buzz.
The Physics Prize will follow on Tuesday and Chemistry on Wednesday.
The Economics Prize -- the only Nobel not created in Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel's 1895 will -- wraps up the announcements on October 9.
Criticism over the lack of gender and geographical diversity has also plagued the science prizes, something the award committees insist they are addressing.
Fifty years ago, 'total fiasco' marred Nobel Peace Prize
Oslo (AFP) Sept 28, 2023 -
The Nobel Peace Prize awarded 50 years ago to then US secretary of state Henry Kissinger and Vietnam's Le Duc Tho remains one of the most controversial Nobels ever.
One of the laureates declined the prize, the other didn't dare travel to Oslo to collect it and two of the five committee members quit in an uproar.
"A total fiasco," in the words of Norwegian Nobel historian Asle Sveen.
"It's the worst prize in the entire history of the Nobel Peace Prize," he told AFP.
The announcement sent shockwaves around the world on October 16, 1973: the Norwegian Nobel Committee had awarded the prize to Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, North Vietnam's chief peace negotiator, "for jointly having negotiated a ceasefire in Vietnam in 1973".
Earlier that year, on January 27, the pair had signed the Paris Peace Accords calling for an armistice in Vietnam.
"It wasn't a peace agreement but a truce that rapidly started to crack," Sveen said.
Perhaps above all, it was an opportunity for America to withdraw its troops from the quagmire in Vietnam, amid vehement anti-war sentiment at home.
The prize sparked instant controversy.
Two disgruntled members of the Nobel committee resigned, a first in the prize's history.
In the United States, the New York Times published an editorial about the "Nobel War Prize", while Harvard University professors wrote to the Norwegian parliament criticising a choice that was "more than a person with a normal sense of justice can take".
American satirical singer Tom Lehrer said that with the prize, "political satire became obsolete".
Kissinger, now 100, was a particular target of criticism, accused of causing the war to spill over into neighbouring Cambodia and ordering massive bombings of Hanoi to ramp up the pressure at the negotiating table.
He was also under fire for having backed Augusto Pinochet's coup in Chile against democratically elected President Salvador Allende.
- 'A bad decision' -
Less well-known, Le Duc Tho was also a hardliner who was already laying the groundwork for the invasion of South Vietnam two years later, in 1975.
He is to this day the only person to decline the Nobel Peace Prize.
"When the Paris agreement on Vietnam is respected, guns are silenced and peace is really restored in South Vietnam, I will consider the acceptance of this prize," he wrote in a telegram to the Peace Prize committee.
Meanwhile, fearing he would be met by angry protests, Kissinger insisted he had to attend a NATO meeting and was unable to pick up the prize in Oslo.
After the fall of Saigon in 1975, he tried to send his prize back to the committee, which refused it.
According to the current head of the Nobel Institute Olav Njolstad, the committee's archived deliberations, recently declassified after 50 years, suggest it hoped the prize would provide the impetus for a lasting peace.
Furthermore, that peace in Vietnam would ease East-West tensions in the rest of the world and help thaw the Cold War.
But, Njolstad admits, "I tend to think it was a bad decision. Usually it's not a good idea to give prizes to people who have been in charge of war."
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