Can we really blame Donald Trump for wanting the Nobel Peace Prize?

US President Donald Trump has made no bones about coveting Nobel Peace Prize. While this has caused endless mirth in social media, his aspiration is an opportunity to examine the popular understanding of peace and pacifism.

Peace is frequently reduced to “opposition to war” after a war has started. Moral discomfort with falling bombs, fleeing refugees and dead civilians that appears once violence is no longer deniable is at best a retrospective humanism, not pacifism.

True pacifism is a principled stance against militarism, which normalises “war-readiness” as a permanent condition of national and global life. It involves an opposition to the political economy of perpetual conflict which makes wars inevitable.