Nobel peace speech

Abstract

The Nobel Peace Prize has long been considered the premier peace prize in the world. According to Geir Lundestad, Secretary of the Nobel Committee, of the 300 some peace prizes awarded worldwide, “none is in any way as well known and as highly respected as the Nobel Peace Prize” (Lundestad, 2001). Nobel peace speech is a unique and significant international site of public discourse committed to articulating the universal grammar of peace. Spanning over 100 years of sociopolitical history on the world stage, Nobel Peace Laureates richly represent an important cross-section of domestic and international issues increasingly germane to many publics. Communication scholars’ interest in this rhetorical genre has increased in the past decade. Yet, the norm has been to analyze a single speech artifact from a prestigious or controversial winner rather than examine the collection of speeches for generic commonalities of import. In this essay, we analyze the discourse of Nobel peace speech inductively and argue that the organizing principle of the Nobel peace speech genre is the repetitive form of normative liberal principles and values that function as rhetorical topoi. These topoi include freedom and justice and appeal to the inviolable, inborn right of human beings to exercise certain political and civil liberties and the expectation of equality of protection from totalitarian and tyrannical abuses. The significance of this essay to contemporary communication theory is to expand our theoretical understanding of rhetoric’s role in the maintenance and development of an international and cross-cultural vocabulary for the grammar of peace.