Each year, the Nobel Prize is awarded to individuals who have made a lasting positive impact on humankind. One of the most influential of the five categories is that of the Nobel Peace Prize. Its founder, Alfred Nobel, decided in his will that the Nobel Peace Prize should be awarded “to the person who has done the most or best to advance fellowship among nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and the establishment and promotion of peace congresses.” (https://bit.ly/3x08uwx)

In 2021, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to two individuals: Dmitry Muratov and Maria Ressa.

Dmitry Andreyevich Muratov (born in 1961) is a Russian journalist who lived through the Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1991. A few years earlier, former Soviet Union president Mikhail Gorbachev introduced glasnost (“openness”), which allowed newspapers to openly criticize the USSR’s government and discuss anti-Soviet protests and movements. This policy allowed Muratov and other journalists to found a newspaper named the Novaya Gazeta. As a result of Muratov’s leadership as editor-in-chief since 1995, the newspaper has openly criticized the Russian government’s corruption and advocated for democracy in Russia in spite of heavy censorship. According to The Nobel Prize, “Six of the newspaper’s journalists have been murdered because they wrote critical articles on Russian military operations in Chechnya and the Caucasus. The best known of them is Anna Politkovskaya.”

Despite immigrating to the United States at a young age, Maria Angelita Ressa (born in 1963) did not forget her roots. After receiving an undergraduate Princeton education, she returned to the Philippines, her native country, to study at the University of the Philippines Diliman as a Fulbright scholar. This move sparked a passion for advocacy and activism inside Ressa, especially when it involved Filipino affairs. In 2011, she and a handful of journalists founded a Facebook page named MovePH that became the online news website Rappler in the following year. Ressa used her power as CEO and president to focus Rappler’s efforts on the prevalence and effect of fake news on Philippine social media and the atrocities of President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs.