The Black Lives Matter Movement Could Win The 2021 Nobel Peace Prize

A Norwegian MP has nominated the social justice movement for this year's award.

After inspiring the largest social justice movement in US history, Black Lives Matter is up for this year's Nobel Peace Prize.

According to The Guardian, Peter Eide, a Norwegian MP who has represented the country's Socialist Left party since 2017, nominated BLM for the 2021 prize. "Black Lives Matter has become a very important worldwide movement to fight racial injustice," Eide wrote in his nomination papers. "They have been able to mobilize people from all groups of society, not just African-Americans, not just oppressed people, it has been a broad movement, in a way which has been different from their predecessors," Eide continued.

Black Lives Matter will contend with hundreds of nominees for the 2021 prize. Last year's award was given to World Food Programme for "[turning] the eyes of the world to the millions of people who suffer from or face the threat of hunger." WFP won out over disgraced former US president, Donald Trump, who was nominated for the second time for his role in the Abraham Accords, an agreement between Israel, United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain.

BLM was founded in 2013 as a decentralized social and racial justice movement in the wake of George Zimmerman's acquittal in the murder of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. Though it has been a consistent presence in protests since Martin's death, the movement gained even more traction in late-spring of 2020 following the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Over the summer, as protests against police brutality went global (even during an unprecedented pandemic,) Black Lives Matter was estimated to be the most expansive civil rights push in the country's history.

The deadline for this year's Nobel Peace Prize nominees is February 1st. A shortlist of nominees will be drawn by the end of March and a winner will be announced in October.