The mission of Business for Peace is to recognise, inspire, and accelerate businessworthy leadership. We recognise businessworthy leadership via our annual Oslo Business for Peace Award. Each year, recipients are selected by an independent committee of Nobel Prize Laureates in Peace and Economics in closed-door sessions. The Award is conferred annually to the exceptional individuals who exemplify the Foundation’s concept of being businessworthy: ethically creating economic value that also creates value for society. Past Honourees represent leaders of diverse industries worldwide.

We welcome you to read more about our Award Criteria, the Business for Peace Award Committee, and the remarkable leaders who are previous recipients of the Business for Peace Award.

The Business for Peace statuette is made by sculptor Bruce Naigles. Read more about his art on his website, including the process behind making the statuette, as told to Hélène Kolmodin from ICC.

The Award Criteria

The Oslo Business for Peace Award is presented annually to businesspersons who are outstandingly promoting the interdependent relationship between business and peace, through their businessworthy actions.

Being businessworthy is to apply your business energy ethically and responsibly with the purpose of creating economic value, as well as value for society.

The Oslo Business for Peace Award aims to highlight ethical and responsible business practices, and the commitment of business leaders as individuals to creating long-term success of benefit to their businesses and society. The independent Award Committee evaluates the Nominees according to three criteria for being businessworthy established by the Business for Peace Foundation:

1. Being a role model to society and their peers
The Nominee is acting as a role model to the general public and the business community by showing how to achieve long term success by being businessworthy.

2. Standing out as an advocate
The Nominee is an outspoken advocate for the importance of ethical and responsible business, seeking to solve problems that create value for both business and society; i.e. being businessworthy.

3. Having earned the trust of stakeholders
The Nominee has earned recognition and appreciation as a business leader by stakeholders in the communities within which the business is developed and cultivated over time.

Our Honourees are awarded both for their past contributions to society, but also as future role models for other business leaders. If negative allegations or facts about our Honourees arise, the Foundation has established a procedure in which a separate commission will be tasked to research the matter and report their findings to the Board of the Foundation. The Board will consider the report and if required give its recommendation to the Award Committee, which will take appropriate measures according to the statutes of the Award.

The Award Committee 

The Oslo Business for Peace Award Committee works independently of the Foundation when assessing nominated candidates. The decision of the committee members is final. After selecting the Business for Peace Honourees, the committee also selects a primus inter pares among them, who will act as the spokesperson for that year’s Honourees.

The members of the Award Committee are Nobel prize winners in Peace or Economics. The task of inviting a new member to the Award committee has been given to former Swedish prime minister Göran Persson, former Norwegian prime minister Kjell Magne Bondevik, and the former director of the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), Kristian Berg Harpviken.

To be ethically credible, the recognition should come from outside the business community, and be esteemed as of the highest possible moral and professional authority. A committee of independent individuals recognised globally for their moral and professional contribution to mankind will consider and confer the Oslo Business for Peace Award. Through their work, the committee will identify the leading businesspersons who spearhead the development ethical business, while creating examples of modern business success.

Members of the Award Committee

Current Members 

Leymah Gbowee
Member 2014 – present

Peace Activist and Winner of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize.

Leymah Gbowee is executive director of the Women Peace and Security Network Africa and a founding member and former coordinator of the Women in Peacebuilding Programme/West African Network for Peacebuilding. For the 2013-2014 academic year, she was a Distinguished Fellow in Social Justice at Barnard College of Columbia University.

Finn Kydland
Member 2014 – present

Winner of the Sveriges Riksbanks Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2004, Finn E. Kydland is the Henley Professor of Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He also holds the Richard P. Simmons Distinguished Professorship at the Tepper School of Business of Carnegie Mellon University.

His main areas of teaching and interest are business cycles, monetary and fiscal policy and labor economics.

Ouided Bouchamaoui
Member 2016 – present

Ouided Bouchamaoui is the President of The Tunisian Confederation of Industry, Trade and Handicrafts (UTICA). Bouchamaoui works to help Tunisia pull through its challenges by pushing for national reconciliation, protecting both enterprises and employment policy, and assisting the urgent need to restore security. For this work, Bouchamaoui was made a Business for Peace Honouree in 2014. In addition, UTICA is one of the four organisations that make up the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2015.

Eric S. Maskin
Member 2017 – present

Eric Maskin is the Adams University Professor at Harvard. He has made contributions to game theory, contract theory, social choice theory, political economy, and other areas of economics. In 2007, he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics (with L. Hurwicz and R. Myerson) for laying the foundations of mechanism design theory, which is the study of how to achieve social or economic goals when information about citizens’ preferences is incomplete.

Previous Members 

Shirin Ebadi
Member 2014 – 2018

Human Rights Advocate and Winner of the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize. Since receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, Ebadi has lectured, taught and received awards in different countries. She has also defended people accused of political crimes in Iran. She has traveled to and spoken to audiences in India, the United States, and other countries. Along with five other Nobel laureates, she created the Nobel Women’s Initiative to promote peace, justice and equality for women.

Michael Spence
Member 2009 – 2017

Winner of the Sveriges Riksbanks Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2001. Michael A. Spence is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and Philip H. Knight Professor Emeritus of Management in the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University. He is the chairperson of an independent Commission on Growth and Development, which was created in 2006 to focus on growth and poverty reduction in developing countries.

Muhammad Yunus 
Member 2009 – 2013

Grameen Bank Founder and Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize 2006. Mohammad, together with the bank he founded, Grameen Bank, won the Nobel Peace Prize for “for their efforts to create economic and social benefit from below.” Grameen Bank was established in the belief that credit is a fundamental human right and with the objective to help poor people escape from poverty by providing loans on terms suitable to them. Replicas of the Grameen Bank model currently operate in more than 100 countries worldwide.

Wangari Maathai 
Member 2009 – 2011

Green Belt Movement Founder and Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize 2004. Dr Wangari Maathai was the founder of the Green Belt Movement, a non-profit, grassroots organisation based in Kenya. Dr. Wangari and the GBM was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 for ”their contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace.” Wangari Maathai sadly passed away in 2011.

Her efforts to the benefit of mankind will be long remembered, and the movement she founded will continue its important work, bringing hope to the lives of millions. Wangari Maathai’s support for our foundation has been significant, and we will always remain grateful for her contribution.

View themes of past Summits here