Mobility of Nobel Laureates
The Nobel Prize was the brainchild of Alfred Nobel (1833-1896), an industrialist, inventor, financier, and spare-time writer who made his fortune from the family dynamite manufacturing firm. The prize has been awarded each year since 1901 for outstanding achievement in various scientific disciplines (physics, chemistry, physiology and medicine, and, from 1969, economics), as well as for literature, and in recognition of efforts to promote peace. A prize may be shared among individual recipients, known as “laureates” (up to three per prize) and/or institutions (in the area of peace, for example). Since its inception, the prize has constantly illustrated the balance maintained between individuals (93% of them male) working in research teams and/or small intellectual groups that are spatially located and increasingly internationalized; lists of award-winners searched out by states; and a proclaimed desire by the Nobel committees (Swedish and Finnish) to transcend national particularities with a view to promoting peace and universal concord. Competition between scientific (sub-)disciplines and research teams has been replaced by assessment of the scientific and cultural standard and, implicitly, of the policies governing research, cultural production, and respect for human rights guaranteed by states. The ritual of the Nobel Prize award therefore honors the exceptional nature of the literary or scientific work, or diplomatic initiatives, offering them unparalleled fame. It also means that their recipients bear the responsibility of embodying certain universal principles.
Geopolitically, the Nobel Prize celebrates “the culmination of a gradual social process of selection, formation, and socialization from among the most eminent networks of research, letters, and politics” (Josepha Laroche). From 1945, the United States became the undisputed leader in this contest, on account of the extensive immigration of scientists and intellectuals fleeing wars, dictatorships, persecutions, and pogroms in Europe, Latin America, and Asia; a secondary reason was that American (or Anglo-Saxon) scientific journals and researchers were omnipresent in the process of assessment and research, confirming the appeal American universities have for the globalized scientific elite. Almost two-thirds of the 179 Nobel Prize winners in science between 1994 and 2017 held posts in the United States at the time their prize was awarded, while a quarter of laureates had worked in at least two different countries.
International mobility of Nobel prize winners in science, 1994-2017
Comment: The pie chart shows the number of Nobel prizes awarded between 1994 and 2017 by the country in which the universities of the prize-winning researchers are located. Out of 179 prizes, almost half were obtained in the United States; the United Kingdom and Japan, which come second, won far fewer. The first ten are therefore all countries in the Northern hemisphere. The arrows show the thirty or so researchers who migrated between starting their research and winning the Nobel Prize; most of them were attracted to the United States, which comes far ahead of the United Kingdom and Australia.
- peace > Peace
- The definition of peace is much debated. A restrictive definition sees peace simply as an absence of conflict (negative peace). Peace Studies reinterpreted this definition to include the conditions necessary for peace – positive peace must be an integral aspect of human society. Combined with the concept of structural violence, positive peace was then defined more broadly to include social justice. Among the different theories of peace, the sometimes criticized notion of democratic or liberal peace asserts that the liberal democracies do not go to war with each other and only fight against non-liberal states (this approach qualifies Kant’s postulate in Perpetual Peace, 1795).
- national > Nation
- Political community based on an awareness of shared characteristics and/or a will to live together. It is common practice to contrast political and cultural concepts of the nation – which in practice are mutually influential and tend to converge. In the political concept, the nation is invented and produced by a state: the territory precedes the nation and defines its contours (this is known as the French concept, based on the republican melting pot and jus soli, right of the soil). In the cultural understanding of nation, a shared common culture produces the nation. The national project consists in bringing this population together on a single territory (the cultural or romantic or German concept of the nation, based on jus sanguinis, right of blood). The latter concept intrinsically produces conflicts and can lead to ethnic cleansing or genocide (Nazi Germany, Greater Serbia, etc.).
- human rights > Human rights
- These are the fundamentally inalienable and universal rights and duties of human beings, which are indefeasible and universal. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these were limited to “natural rights” (basic freedoms considered to be allied to human nature) but human rights have now been expanded to include civil, political, economic, social, cultural, and environmental rights on the basis of human freedom and dignity. Human rights have been enshrined in the constitutions of most democratic regimes. They are also subject to many protective provisions at both regional and international levels.