Venezuela’s Opposition Leader María Corina Machado Wins 2025 Nobel Peace Prize

OSLO — In a striking decision, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has awarded the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize to Venezuelan opposition figure María Corina Machado, lauding her sustained efforts to restore democratic governance in Venezuela.

The committee credited her “tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.” Machado’s activism stands out in a country where democratic institutions have been eroded and dissent harshly repressed.

Machado, born in Caracas in 1967, is an engineer by training. Early on, she co-founded the civic group Súmate, dedicated to election monitoring and promoting citizen participation in free elections. She later entered formal politics, founding the opposition party Vente Venezuela and helping to unify disparate opposition factions via the Soy Venezuela alliance.

Ahead of Venezuela’s contested 2024 election, she was disqualified from running by the Maduro-controlled authorities. Undeterred, she backed an alternate candidate, helped mobilize volunteer election observers nationwide and amassed independent tallies to contest the government’s announced results.

Despite facing threats, political bans, forced periods in hiding and a hostile state apparatus, Machado remained in Venezuela rather than flee overseas. In awarding the prize, the Nobel Committee called her “one of the most extraordinary examples of civilian courage in Latin America.”

Venezuela has slid from a relatively stable democracy to a deeply authoritarian state.The Maduro regime has gerrymandered courts and electoral bodies, disqualified opposition candidates, harassed civil society, and suppressed critical voices.

The 2024 election was marked by credible allegations of vote manipulation, suppression and the refusal to accept counter-tallies.

Meanwhile, Venezuela endures a severe humanitarian and economic collapse: hyperinflation, breakdown of public services, food and medicine shortages and mass emigration (nearly 8 million Venezuelans have left).

Machado’s Nobel Prize thus takes place against this backdrop: a nation with stripped civil space, desperate citizens and an opposition under siege.

While the Peace Prize drew political and international attention, the 2025 Nobel awards also honored major scientific and cultural breakthroughs:

• Medicine / Physiology: Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell, and Shimon Sakaguchi were recognized for uncovering mechanisms of peripheral immune tolerance — how the immune system restrains itself to avoid attacking the body.
• Physics: John M. Martinis, John Clarke, and Michel H. Devoret won for demonstrating macroscopic quantum tunnelling and energy quantisation in electrical circuits — bridging quantum phenomena with mesoscopic systems.
• Chemistry: Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson, and Omar M. Yaghi earned the prize for their work on metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) — porous materials with applications in gas capture, catalysis, storage, and environmental remediation.
• Literature: Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai was awarded for a body of work that “in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.”

Thursday 18 February 2021, 12 noon (GMT), India time 5.30 pm by Zoom

University of Southampton India Centre in association with Southampton Business School is delighted to host Sharad Vivek Sagar, an award-winning young millennial global social entrepreneur, whose inspirational leadership has transformed the lives of millions of children and youth. Shut out of formal education for the first 12 years of his life in small towns and villages of India, Sagar’s journey to real world has been remarkable, yet humble. One of the milestones in that journey was his education at Tufts University in Massachusetts, with full scholarship, where he graduated with a degree in International Relations.

In 2008, at the age of 16, Sagar founded Dexterity Global with a mission to empowering the next generation of leaders for India and the world, enabling educational opportunities with scholarships, building institutions that groom next generation leaders, and instilling a culture of servant leadership.

Today, Dexterity Global connects over 6.5 million young people and provide them with educational opportunities; their alumni have generated over £5m full scholarship; and they hold an exceptional record of supporting and training over 2 million students, parents and teachers. Forbes calls Dexterity Global “a system of educational platforms” equipping young people with “the mentality to solve “21st century problems with 21st century solutions.”

Sagar’s work is redefining education and leadership for millions of young Indians. He is a recipient of numerous awards and honours. President Barack Obama invited him to the White House, the Nobel Peace Centre invited him to the Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony, the Queen of England included him in “Queen’s Young Leaders” and India’s leading media house Divya Bhaskar called him “the Vivekananda of 21st Century”. He holds a record of the first freshman at Tufts University to win a $100k entrepreneurship (new ventures) challenge, and numerous awards thereafter including the Presidential Award for Citizenship and Public Service, the Wendell Phillips Memorial Prize, Paul and Elizabeth Montle Prize and Samuel Huntington Public Service Award. Later in 2016, he delivered the baccalaureate address at Tufts University.

Sagar considers himself a dedicated worker of Swami Vivekananda committed to building servant leaders for India through education. Sagar has been invited globally to speak on education and leadership, and he is the youngest Indian to deliver a Convocation Address. His inspirational talks available on the internet have been watched by millions of people from across the world. Launched by the Dexterity Global Alumni Council, their #20MomentsOfDexterity campaign reached over 1.2 million people through Twitter and over 100 million people through media stories.