The Nobel Prizes, the first of which were awarded in 1901, have, over many decades, been regarded in the Western world as the most prestigious awards given for intellectual achievement. They are awarded annually from a fund bequeathed by famed Swedish inventor and industrialist Alfred Bernhard Nobel, whose father, Immanuel Nobel, was also an inventor and engineer.

While all the others are administered by academies and institutes of science, literature and medicine, the Peace Prize is awarded by the Nobel Committee of the Norwegian Parliament (the Storting). It is this exclusive group of Norwegian politicians that, every year, invites a specially selected worldwide group of "scholarly academies, scientists, university professors, previous Nobel laureates, members of parliaments and other assemblies" to submit nominations.

In its 109-year history, the overwhelming majority of Nobel Prizes have gone to winners in the North, while less than a quarter have gone to the South. Writers, personalities and institutions from developing countries have won prizes for Literature and Peace, but very few for sciences and inventions. The scientific and discovery categories have always been dominated by the North. The scientific and technical bias of awards in favor of the developed countries is still overwhelming and is regarded as a serious under-representation of the achievements of scientists and thinkers in developing countries, both large and small.

By 2007, 80 Literature Prizes had been awarded to European winners, 11 to Americans and two to the Caribbean. India broke the European trend in 1913 and the US won its first Literature prize in 1930. In the second half of the 20th century, however, the South has been better represented among the top winners in the Literature category: Chile (1945 and 1971), Guatemala (1967), Colombia (1982), Nigeria (1986), Egypt (1988), Mexico (1990), South Africa (1991 and 2003) and St. Lucia (1992). In the case of the Peace Prize, by 2007, 49 had been awarded (singly and shared) to Europeans and 21 to Americans, with only 20 to all developing countries combined.

The Nobel Peace Prize distribution process is also interesting. Most are awarded to individuals or single entities, but some are shared between winners from different countries and for different causes. These include agencies and personalities such as Kofi Annan and the United Nations (2001) and Al Gore and the Inter-governmental Program for Climate Change (2007). UN agencies have won over a dozen times in the Prize's long history, ranging from the UN High Commission for Refugees (1954), UNICEF (1965) the International Labour Organization (ILO) in 1969 to the UN Peace-Keeping Forces (1988) and Mohamed El Baradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 2005.

Some Nobel Peace prize awards have been well received by the world – like those to Martin Luther King (1964), Mother Teresa (1879), and Desmond Tutu (1984). They have also been shared between sworn enemies who smoked the peace pipe, such as Israel's Menachem Begin and Egypt's Anwar Sadat (1978), South Africa's Nelson Mandela and F.W. De Klerk (1993), Palestine's Yasir Arafat with Israel's Shimon Perez and Yitzhak Rabin (1994), East Timor's Carlos Felipe Ximenes Belo and Jose Ramos-Horta (1996) and Northern Ireland's John Hume and David Trimble (1998).

In some cases, nominated Peace Prize partners have declined to accept, as did Le Duc Tho of Vietnam, when nominated alongside Henry Kissinger in 1973.