Tunisia’s National Dialogue Quartet has won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize for its work in supporting the country’s democratization process in the wake of the so-called “Jasmine Revolution” of 2011.

The announcement came Friday in Oslo from Kaci Kullman Five, head of the Nobel Committee.

The quartet is made up of labor unions as well as the Tunisian Human Rights League and the Tunisian Order of Lawyers.

Kullman Five said the group started its work at a time when Tunisia’s fragile democratization process was in danger of collapsing as a result of political assassinations and social unrest.

“It established an alternative peaceful political process at a time when the country was on the brink of civil war,” Kullman explained.

Tunisia was the site of the first of the popular uprisings in 2011 known as the “Arab Spring.” Tunisians took to the streets and forced the departure of longtime President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, in the hopes of ending decades of autocratic rule and corruption.

By many accounts, Tunisia is the Arab Spring’s only success story.

While Egypt and Libya plunged into political turmoil and Syria descended into an all-out civil war, Tunisia carried out a non-violent election process in which voters last year handed victory to a secular political party.

But questions remain on how sustainable the gains will be as the country continues to struggle with corruption, a 35-percent unemployment rate among young people and the recruitment of thousands of young Tunisians by extremists, including the Islamic State group.

The United States this year pledged hundreds of millions of dollars in additional aid and more cooperation to bolster the fledgling democracy. During a visit by Tunisia’s president to Washington in May, President Obama designated the country as a major non-NATO ally of the United States, making it possible for Tunisia to receive more military aid.

The Nobel committee on Friday said it hopes Tunisia will serve as an example for other countries.

This year’s list of 273 contenders was among the longest ever for the peace prize and included Pope Francis as well as German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

About the prize

Nobel Prizes are awarded each year in medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and peace.  The money comes from a bequest by Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel.  The awards, in existence since 1901, have become a top achievement honor in each field.

The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences is also awarded by the committee, although it is not one of the original prizes set up by Alfred Nobel.  It will be announced next Monday – the last of the several prizes.

Nobel Prize winners are awarded a monetary prize that varies slightly in amount from year to year; in 2015, it is about $975,000. They are also given a medal and a Nobel diploma, awarded at ceremonies in Oslo and in Stockholm in December.

Multiple winners divide the prize equally among themselves.

Literature

On Thursday the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich for what the Nobel Committee called “her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.”

Alexievich has written books on the human impact of the Chernobyl disaster, the 10-year Soviet-Afghanistan war, and Soviet and post-Soviet history. Her work relies heavily on oral history and first-person perspective.

Her works include 1985’s The Unwomanly Face of War, a novel made up of monologues of some 200 women who served in World War Two; Voices from Chernobyl, an oral history, comprised of some 500 interviews on the 1986 nuclear power plant disaster in Ukraine; and Zinky Boys, a first hand account of the Soviet-Afghan war.

Chemistry

Wednesday, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to three scientists for their work on human DNA repair, which can be used in treatment of cancer.

The laureates were Tomas Lindahl, a Swede based at Britain’s Francis Crick Institute; American Paul Modrich of Duke University in the United States; and Aziz Sancar, a Turkish American based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, also in the United States.

Physics, medicine

On Tuesday, the 2015 Nobel Physics prize was awarded to Takaaki Kajita of Japan and Arthur MacDonald of Canada for their discovery of neutrino oscillations, which show that neutrinos – the second-most abundant particles in the universe, next to photons – have mass and change identities.

On Monday, the Nobel committee announced the prize winners for medicine: scientists from Ireland, Japan and China.  William Campbell of Ireland, Satoshi Omura of Japan,and China’s Tu Youyou share the prize. Campbell and Omura discovered a new therapy for infections caused by roundworm parasites. Tu discovered a drug that has significantly reduced the mortality rates for patients suffering from malaria.
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