A public appeal to Norwegian Nobel Committee on behalf of people of Kerala

To the Honourable members of the Nobel Committee,
We, on behalf of the people of Kerala, are writing this letter to lodge a public appeal against some nominations that came in support of US President Donald Trump for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize.

To put the perspective clear at the outset, our grievance has very little to do with who Trump is, nor are we here to dispute or evaluate the merits of his claim that he ended six (or seven) wars. Our sole intention is to draw your attention to his trade policies and their detrimental effects on global peace.

Our arguments are based on how trade influences peace and harmony both among and within nations, and we would like to illustrate this by drawing your attention to our home state, Kerala.

Trade and peace
The role of trade interdependence in promoting peace and security among nations is well established in scholarly discourse, with notable examples including the ‘commercial peace theory’ and the WTO’s Trade for Peace Programme.

As you are well aware of, a good illustration of this can be drawn from Europe itself, which once fought the Hundred Years’ War and two World Wars.

Peace among the erstwhile warring European nations over the last half-century has been sustained largely through the establishment of common trade-facilitating institutions, such as the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation immediately after World War II, and later the European Economic Area and the Euro currency.

History has shown that disputes over trade among nations can easily escalate and strain relations even between time-tested allies. A recent example is the US and Canada, whose ties deteriorated following President Trump’s unilateral imposition of tariffs on Canadian imports.

The Kerala story
Kerala is a striking grassroots model of how a culture of trade, sustained over many millennia, cultivates deeper linkages among communities and fosters peaceful coexistence. This southwestern Indian state has a unique trading history dating back to the 3rd millennium BC, which brought Sumerian, Roman, Chinese, and Arab traders to its coast.

Flip through the pages of a Norwegian dictionary and you will come across a now-obsolete word, malebarisk, meaning extraordinary, though many Norwegians may not realise that it refers to the historic trade coast of Malabar in old Kerala.

To illustrate how trade formed our society, we would like to draw the Nobel Committee’s attention to the Jewish community in Kochi, the historic port city of Kerala. The Jews are believed to have arrived in Kerala as traders during the era of King Solomon, a view supported by Hebrew inscriptions found on various artefacts originating from the region.

Kerala is perhaps the only place in the world where Jews were never persecuted. Its history was shaped by diverse religious communities living in harmony for centuries, sustained by a trading culture that fostered trust and left little space for ethnic violence.

To further illustrate this, we bring in a contemporary anecdote of the relationship between entrepreneur Sarah Jacob Cohen, one of the oldest members of Kochi's Jewish community, and Taha Ibrahim, a Muslim street vendor who cared for Ms Cohen until her death at the age of 96 in 2019.

A simple act of trust sparked one of humanity’s most treasured relationships in the early 1980s: Sarah’s husband, Jacob Elias Cohen, entrusted Taha, a teenage Muslim boy, to keep his trade belongings in the Jewish home.

Sarah Cohen’s embroidery shop in Kochi’s Jew Town is currently run by Taha Ibrahim, where visitors can buy Jewish speciality items such as handmade kippah caps and halah covers, along with viewing a small museum that preserves her personal belongings.

At a time when the ‘genocidal’ war in Gaza deepens humanitarian crises with few parallels in modern history, we feel the Kerala story of Jews and Muslims harmoniously tied by trade matters greatly.

Such a cosmopolitan trading culture significantly contributed to shaping Kerala as one of the most peaceful societies in India, where the three major religious communities – Hindus, Muslims, and Christians – along with other minorities, remain intricately interconnected through trade networks, even extending to the diasporic level.

Tariff victims
The rules-based era of global trade, which began with the signing of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1947 and was consolidated through multiple rounds of negotiations and political contestations, ultimately culminated in the establishment of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 1995.

The kind of disruption that Trump’s unilateral tariffs inflict on the painstakingly built global trading system is nothing short of disastrous.

The ‘golden’ promise of global trade has now turned into a deadly trap for exporters and labourers in Kerala. They are being forced out of the market by President Trump’s retaliatory tariffs, which undermine the multilateral trading system.

In the villages of southern Kerala, traditional cashew factory workers – once a textbook case of integration with the global economy – are now gripped by a livelihood crisis.

With centuries of inherited expertise, they shell, peel, and roast imported raw cashew nuts from Africa for export, until recently primarily to American and other Western markets.

Shocking stories of piled-up stocks in the godowns of export-oriented seafood processing units in Kerala, coupled with cancelled orders from the US, are emerging, leaving thousands unemployed.

What makes it alarming is that these are enterprises with heavy investments to meet stringent quality requirements in processing, supported by a highly trained staff equipped to meet the global export standards.

In these hard times, as our marine export industry faces an existential crisis, we gratefully acknowledge Norway’s historic role in modernising Kerala’s fisheries sector during the difficult years following our independence from the British Empire.

In 1952, the Norwegian government launched its first-ever international foreign aid project in Kerala, providing motorboats and introducing processing facilities – a pioneering peace initiative that laid the foundation for the state to become a major player in the seafood export market.

Our core grievance
We believe that President Trump has weaponised trade, unilaterally imposing tariffs on countries that stand in the way of his Nobel Prize aspirations.

The greatest irony of our time is that a US president, while instigating or threatening multiple trade wars – thereby creating suffering populations and a discordant world – is simultaneously pursuing one of humanity’s highest honours: the Nobel Peace Prize.

Therefore, on behalf of the people of Kerala, we respectfully but firmly urge the Norwegian Nobel Committee to reject any consideration of Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize.

President Trump, the ‘greatest disruptor’ of global trade this century, in no way fulfils Alfred Nobel’s core vision for awarding the Peace Prize to someone “who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations.”
(Social anthropologist and novelist Thomas Sajan and US-trained neurologist Titto Idicula, based in Norway, write on politics, culture, economy, and medicine.)