Women-Led Movements Win ‘Alternative Nobel’ For Taking On Authoritarianism, Big Tech

Stockholm: Four individuals and organisations challenging authoritarian rule, patriarchal violence and unchecked AI development have been awarded the Right Livelihood Award, widely known as the ‘alternative Nobel Prize’.

This year’s prize champions those offering “resistance to systems that push people to the margins.” All four recipients are women or female-led organisations.

Eritrean computer scientist Timnit Gebru was among the winners. Founder of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR), she was praised “for challenging concentrated power in artificial intelligence, and pioneering digital technology rooted in justice, lived experience and human agency.”

Pakistani lawyer Jalila Haider was also honored for challenging “ethnic, state and patriarchal persecution” in her community, the Persian-speaking Hazara ethnic group.

The two winning organisations are the Rural Women’s Assembly and the Georgian Young Lawyers’ Association. The Rural Women’s Assembly empowers women in Africa to defend land, seed and bodily autonomy against corporate dispossession. The Georgian Young Lawyers’ Association works to safeguard Georgian democracy “in the face of an autocratic crackdown.

“Announcing the recipients, Ole von Uexkull, executive director of Right Livelihood, said the winners were “rewriting the rules that autocrats, patriarchs and Silicon Valley’s most powerful men assumed were theirs to write alone.”