Transition to Democracy: Nobel Peace Prize Is Awarded to National Dialogue Quartet Sewell Chan - The New York Times
go to original October 10, 2015

A coalition of labor union leaders, businesspeople, lawyers and human rights activists won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for what the Nobel committee called “its decisive contribution to the building of a pluralistic democracy in Tunisia in the wake of the Jasmine Revolution of 2011.”

The prize to the coalition, known as the National Dialogue Quartet, comes nearly five years after an unemployed street vendor set himself on fire, touching off a political earthquake that toppled Tunisia’s longtime authoritarian president and proceeded to reverberate throughout the Middle East and North Africa.

Among the disappointments of what has become known as the Arab Spring — collapsed states in Libya, Syria and Yemen; the return of rule by a military strongman in Egypt; and the rise of the Islamic State in the sectarian caldron of Syria and Iraq — the relative success of Tunisia’s transition to democracy has been a wisp of hope.

The quartet comprises four organizations: the Tunisian General Labor Union; the Tunisian Confederation of Industry, Trade and Handicrafts; the Tunisian Human Rights League; and the Tunisian Order of Lawyers. But the Norwegian Nobel Committee emphasized that the prize “is awarded to this quartet, not to the four individual organizations as such.”

Read the rest at The New York Times

Related: Nobel Peace Prize Winners Throughout History (The New York Times)

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