Four laureates, one familiar warning: power is getting lazier

Awards are usually designed to flatter the respectable. The Right Livelihood Award prefers a less soothing role: it hands attention to people who stand in the way of power when power is most comfortable. This year, that means four laureates selected from 200 nominees in 72 countries, all of them women or women-led organisations, and all of them working in terrain where resistance is rarely decorative.

The 2026 recipients are Jalila Haider, the Rural Women's Assembly, the Georgian Young Lawyers' Association and Timnit Gebru. Their causes differ, but the pattern is familiar enough to be depressing: each is pushing back against a system that tries to keep others quiet, dependent or invisible. The award ceremony will take place in Stockholm on 1 December.

Haider, a Pakistani human rights lawyer, is being recognised for becoming the first female lawyer from the Hazara community and for challenging ethnic, state and patriarchal persecution. The jury says her work is guided by the belief that no person should be forced into illegality. It is a simple idea, which perhaps explains why it remains so politically inconvenient.

The Rural Women's Assembly is honoured for building a strong movement of rural women in southern Africa. According to the jury, the group has helped women defend their land, seeds and bodily autonomy against corporate interests and patriarchal exploitation. That is not a niche concern, however much polite society likes to treat it as one.

The Georgian Young Lawyers' Association is being recognised for work carried out under political repression to strengthen Georgian democracy and protect civilian control of power. That is the sort of patient institutional labour that rarely attracts applause, though it tends to matter rather more than ceremonial outrage.

Gebru, an Ethiopian-born computer scientist, is the fourth laureate. The citation says she has challenged concentrated power in artificial intelligence and helped develop digital technologies rooted in justice, lived experience and human agency. In a sector that often mistakes scale for wisdom, that is a useful corrective.

The prize itself has a long pedigree. The Right Livelihood Award was established in 1980 by the German-Swedish writer and philatelist Jakob von Uexkull to honour practical solutions to the planet’s and humanity’s most urgent problems. It also comes with long-term support, intended to help laureates expand and promote their work.

So the annual ritual continues: a prize, a stage, and a reminder that some of the most serious work in public life is still done by people resisting the people who prefer things left untouched. The ceremony in Stockholm will provide the applause. The harder part is what happens after it.

Written by Thomas Nussbaumer thomas.nussbaumer@alpineweekly.com