Greta Thunberg does not need a Nobel Prize, she is everything it has forgotten

In a world that awards the Nobel Peace Prize to agents of Washington’s geopolitical agenda, perhaps it’s time we need to stop fawning over it as if it were the pinnacle of justice. Stop proposing Greta Thunberg for an award that confuses moral legitimacy with liberal applause. Greta, and every intersectional feminist who refuses to bow to power, deserve far better than this colonial trophy.

The Nobel Committee has long ceased to be about peace, it has become a stage where the West congratulates itself for the violence it disguises as virtue. From the drone-war king Barack Obama to Aung San Suu Kyi whose hands are stained with the blood of the Rohingya, to now Maria Corina Machado, the award always serves as a gold-plated stamp of Western moral supremacy.

Machado is no heroine of democracy. She is a functionary of US imperialism, taking American money via Súmate project, plotting coups, and calling for foreign intervention to overthrow her government. Foreign assistance should never come with imperial strings attached; the global aid industry has long been criticised as an extension of colonialism’s “civilising mission”. Upon receiving the award, she thanked Donald Trump and the MAGA movement for their support, revealing precisely where her allegiances lie. Recognising legitimate resistance is very different from celebrating safe opposition that plays by imperial rules. 

In this imperial moral theatre, Greta’s resistance reminds us that peace cannot be handed down by those who profit from war; but built by those who dare to expose its players. Her power is not measured in medals or applause but in the tremor she sends through a world built on denial. 

The moment she connected the dots between ecological collapse to imperial extraction and exploitation, she suddenly became too inconvenient for the Western media. The same outlets that once hailed her as the “global icon” and the conscience of a generation now smear her as divisive and even dangerous. Forbes lamented that her “Stand With Gaza” endangers the “neutrality” and “a problem for the climate movement.” 

But Greta understood what they fear most, that all oppressions are connected; and you cannot save the planet without confronting the empire. Her refusal to separate planetary justice from human justice is what makes her feminism whole and powerful. 

The Nobel Peace Prize as a colonial trophy

From its origins in a Eurocentric, Colonial worldview, The Nobel Peace Prize was never built for liberation.  It rewards those who make dissent digestible for empire, not those who dismantle it. Barack Obama received it while expanding drone warfare across West Asia and North Africa. The European Union was celebrated amid its militarised borders and refugee deaths at sea. Henry Kissinger was lauded for his “diplomatic” efforts, from backing coups in Chile and Argentina, to waging wars in Cambodia, Vietnam, and Bangladesh, and shielding Israel’s occupation in Palestine. And are we truly meant to dignify the same award that also nominated President Trump and Daniella Weiss, a settler leader fuelling apartheid violence in Palestine? 

Then comes Malala Yousafzai the Nobel Peace Prize 2014 laureate. Who would have thought that the young girl who was brutalised for wanting an education, would eventually be re-scripted into the empire’s choreography of virtue? Behind US AID  do-gooder image lies an extractive system that masks exploitation with compassion, softening the brutality of empire without ever challenging it. Aid and empire after all, are symbiotic— each sustains the illusion of the other’s benevolence. So when the moment demanded moral courage, when Gaza burned, when the imperial machine turned on other brown bodies, Malala didn’t say a single word; not until she finally saw the tides were turning, all while still kissing the empire’s hand.  

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As Chandra Mohanty (in Feminism without Borders) and María Lugones (in Coloniality of Gender) remind us, Western feminism too often universalises womanhood while erasing the colonial hierarchies that shape our lives. It demands progress without decolonisation. Homi Bhabha calls this performance colonial mimicry; that the subaltern permitted to perform pain and resistance, but only so far as it flatters Western fantasies of liberation. In this logic, the “liberated” woman becomes a token of the empire’s civility; a proof that the system works if you play by its rules.

In post-colonial performance critique, Judith Butler explains how empire props up “acceptable” women from occupied nations across the Global South, turning them into poster girls of progress. From Malala in Pakistan to Maria Corina Machado in Venezuela, these figures are curated, chosen not because they challenge power, but because they make it look benevolent. 

Liberal feminism’s imperial core

Liberal feminism is the capitalism of gender politics. It sells empowerment as lifestyle, not liberation. It demands equality within patriarchy, but not freedom from it. It celebrates women who adapt to oppression rather than dismantle it. From Malala Yousafzai to Taylor Swift, and now María Machado, liberal feminism has mastered the art of turning liberation into “soft power”. It tells us that equality is achieved when one woman makes it to the boardroom, the stage, or the White House. But what use is equality within a system designed to oppress? A seat at the table means nothing when the table itself is built on exploitation. 

This feminism; Swift’s corporate feminism, Malala’s polished diplomacy, Machado’s imperial alignment, is the one patriarchy loves most: visible, adored, docile and safe. Patriarchy no longer needs to punish women; it simply partners with the ones who play along. Swift profits from the language of liberation from white mediocrity that rarely moves beyond typecast femininity; and without ever having to risk the comfort it affords her. Her silence on Palestine, Sudan, and systemic violence is the natural outcome of a superficial feminism designed to soothe without making it revolutionary. 

But true equality will never arrive through liberal feminism. The problem is not merely that women are missing from positions of power. The problem is that the system itself, the patriarchy, colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism is structured to produce inequality. And liberal feminism does not demand its dismantling; it instead asks that women be allowed inside it. The result: only a handful of women, including many white women rise and appear powerful, while the rest remain trapped under intersecting oppressions.

Greta radical and intersectional feminism in contrast, remains dangerous precisely because she refuses to be consumed. She understands what liberal feminism refuses to see; that the crisis of gender is inseparable from the crises of capitalism, colonialism, and climate. Her rage cannot be tamed, her politics cannot be softened, and her moral clarity refuses to fit within the empire’s choreography of virtue. 

Solidarity, intersectionality, and true feminist resistance

Intersectional feminism demands that we see not just gender, but race, class, coloniality, geography, ability. It demands that we center those most harmed, those most marginalized— the women in Gaza, Sudan, Syria; disabled women; the indigenous women; trans women; sex workers; the migrant and forcibly displaced women; women in environments being destroyed by mining and climate collapse. It demands that we challenge the system, not just who gets into its rooms.

The liberal imperial feminists can keep Taylor Swift. They can keep Malala. Keep the Nobel Prize and its CIA-funded laureates. But for people with conscience, we choose Greta, Francesca Albanese, Huwaida Arraf, Bisan, Abby Martin and every other feminist that challenges the imperial power. A feminism that risks safety. A feminism that does not ask only for equality within systems that are built on oppression, but for freedom from them. The transitional feminism that draws links between climate and capitalism, gender and empire, justice and solidarity, all while dismantling these oppressive powers. They do not need a Nobel Prize to prove the worth of their resistance. Their power lies in their refusal to be bought, beautified, or absorbed into empire. They embodies what the prize has forgotten; the moral clarity, risk, and solidarity beyond borders. Because when we praise only those women who are aligned with or tolerated by power, we reinforce the very structures that harm most women. 

In a global order that rewards complicity and punishes conscience, the most radical thing a woman can be is unapologetically angry, and unwilling to perform for oppressors’ approval and applause.

Be like Greta. Be ungovernable. Be resolute. To resist is to exist.

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