Guardian readers voted for who they think is most worthy of joining the exclusive club from a list of Guardian reader and journalist nominations.

Hassan Rouhani, nominated by the Guardian's Iran reporter Saeed Kamali Dehghan, soared ahead to win with 7687 votes, just over three quarters of all votes in the journalists' nominees poll. But it was a close race between Edward Snowden and Greenpeace in the readers poll, with Snowden managing a win by just three per cent.

Last year, the Norwegian Nobel committee put aside the economic crisis and awarded the habitually divisive Nobel peace prize to the European Union for "its decades-long historical role in promoting reconciliation and peace".

Since then, it has been a dismal year for peace, with recent events in Syria, Egypt and Kenya offering grim reminders of man's inhumanity to man. But behind the scenes there are great people working tirelessly for a more peaceful world.

Do you agree with Guardian readers or is there a more deserving contender? Tell us what you think in the thread below.

@birgittaj: Manning helped to fuel a worldwide discussion about the overseas engagements of the United States, civilian casualties of war and rules of engagement. Citizens worldwide owe a great debt to the WikiLeaks whistleblower for shedding light on these issues, and so we urge the Committee to award this prestigious prize to accused whistleblower Bradley Manning.

Jacob Riley: The person who should win the Nobel Peace Prize is the same person who won the 2012 Guardian person of the year with 70% majority and that is Bradley Manning. Bradley leaked evidence of War Crimes the US military was committing and he leaked evidence of Government corruption.

• Vote for Chelsea Manning here

Edward Snowden

The computer analyst whistleblower who provided the Guardian with top-secret GCHQ and NSA documents leading to revelations on the scale of UK and US surveillance on phone and internet communications.

• Vote for Edward Snowden here

Greenpeace

parispeter: It's high time that the brave & determined staff and volunteers of Greenpeace were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. They have been campaigning for over 40 years for a safer and more sustainable world.

• Vote for Greenpeace here

Denis Mukwege, nominated by Judith Soal, deputy foreign editor

Photograph: Alex Duval Smith for the Observer

As a child, Denis Mukwege had no political ambitions. He was the son of a Congolese pastor and sometimes joined his father on visits to sick congregants.

"He prayed for [them] but he did not give medicine. He said that was the doctor's job. So I told him I would become a doctor so people he prayed for would get better more quickly," Mukwege said in a 2010 interview.

He trained as a gynaecologist and went on to treat thousands of women gang-raped during the DRC conflict, becoming a world expert in repairing vaginas.

Mukwege began travelling the world speaking out against the violence, condemning the rebels, the DRC and Rwandan governments and the international community for not bringing it to an end.

A month after Mukwege addressed the UN general assembly last year, armed men tried to assassinate him. His guard was killed and he was seriously injured, forcing the doctor and his family into exile.

Yet earlier this year Mukwege returned to his clinic in South Kivu, determined to keep speaking out and keep treating the women who need his help.

Eve Ensler, the creator of the Vagina Monologues, calls him one of the "few heroes in this world".

• Vote for Denis Mukwege here

Teresita Quintos Deles, nominated by Simon Tisdall, foreign affairs columnist

Photograph: Aaron Favila/AP

The long-running Muslim insurgency in Mindanao, in the impoverished southern Philippines, has claimed an estimated 120,000 lives over 40 years and frustrated all attempts at a settlement. It is one of the world's most intractable conflicts.

That it is now close to resolution is thanks in large part to Teresita Quintos Deles, a former teacher, women's rights advocate and anti-poverty tsar known popularly as Ging who was re-appointed presidential adviser on the peace process by the president, Benigno Aquino, in July 2010.

Since then, her steady and patient hand has guided the combatants of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and their government interlocutors towards a historic peace deal that both sides now regard as all but inevitable, despite the continued violent opposition of a hardline splinter group.

• Vote for Teresita Quintos Deles here

Malala Yousafzai, nominated by Guardian staff

Photograph: Darren Staples/ Reuters

Not the most original suggestion, but certain to be one of the most popular. It was a year ago almost to the day that Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head on her way back from school by gunmen furious at her campaign to secure education for girls in Pakistan.

Since then, her recovery has been courageous, her cause exemplary and her impact and influence growing. She has impressed not only the denizens of international diplomacy but more importantly her own constituency back at home – the millions of Pakistani schoolgirls who, before Malala, may have been uncertain as to whether they even deserved an education.

Even her most bitter opponents have indicated that they may have got it wrong. A vote for her on Friday would go a long way to addressing one of the most pressing issues in fiercely patriarchal societies.

• Vote for Malala Yousafzai here

Olivier De Schutter, nominated by Mark Tran, global development reporter

Photograph: Alberto Pizzoli/AFP/Getty Images

Olivier De Schutter is the UN special rapporteur on the right to food. A consistent advocate on behalf of smallholder farmers, he has urged developing countries to reinvest in their agricultural sectors rather than rely on imports from volatile world markets. He has also been critical of large-scale land acquisitions and biofuel production in poor countries.

Writing on CiF befor the G8 summit, De Schutter stressed the importance of tax transparency in reducing hunger.

He wrote: "The hunger and tax agendas must be brought together. The relatively simpler part has been done, in the shape of fresh aid commitments at the nutrition for growth summit. Now, in Lough Erne, the G8 must treat tax injustice as the driver of hunger and poverty that it is, urgently initiating a new era of tax transparency.

"This would pave the way for the world's poorest countries to play their part in the fight against hunger – the most complex part, which only they can perform – by taxing fairly, governing coherently, and putting their resources at the service not of elites or multinationals, but of their poorest citizens."

• Vote for Olivier De Schutter here

Sulabh International, nominated by Jason Burke, south Asia correspondent

Sulabh International is an NGO with tens of thousands of members and workers which campaigns to bring safe, environmentally friendly sanitation to the hundreds of millions of poor Indians who lack toilets. At a time when public health is barely part of the political debate, despite huge numbers of preventable deaths through gastro-enteric illnesses and other maladies caused by poor sanitation and despite the vast cost to the economy of the failure to provide basic facilities to so many, the NGO continues a long and difficult fight to mobilise, teach and organise. For work previously done, and continuing efforts in this vital area, they are worthy of recongition.

• Vote for Sulabh International here

Hassan Rouhani, nominated by Saeed Kamali Dehghan, Iran reporter

Hassan Rouhani, the moderate Iranian cleric whose sensational victory in Iran's June election took many by surprise, might not be the perfect reformer. But as an ultimate insider who enjoys backing both from the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and its reform-seeking critics, like the Green Movement, can be best positioned to find a way out of current stalemate with Iran.

He has already brought encouraging changes, not least putting an end to the embarrassment of the Ahmadinejad years, starting a new chapter for improved relations with the west, securing the release of a number of political prisoners and increasing hopes for the release of opposition leaders under house arrest, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi. Above all, Rouhani showed his potential last week with the promising developments during in New York and broke the 34-year-long taboo of direct talks with the US. A peace Nobel prize will help him to materialise promises of bringing moderation back to Iran.

• Vote for Hassan Rouhani here

Dennis Rodman, nominated by Mark Rice-Oxley, international planning editor

A rank outsider, yes, a clown and a maverick for sure – and not nearly as dignified as the other names on this list. He hasn't taken the huge personal risks that the likes of Edward Snowden (who incidentally cannot win this year's award because he was not nominated in time) have taken. And I'm not even much of a basketball fan. And yet …

Conventional diplomacy is stuck in a rut. Why else do we still have the same crises, Israel-Palestine, Iran-US, North Korea-South Korea, year after year? Because state actors are not imaginative – or brave – enough to try something new. Suspicions abound. Vested interests hold sway. And the misery of ordinary people continues.

Rodman's trips to North Korea have been bizarre and often a bit silly. But he's opened up a channel where none existed before. He's shown the North Koreans that someone will talk to them. And presumably he's done so with American blessing: it's hard to imagine these visits happening with some state department types having a word in his ear. If we ever get to détente will we look back on these trips as the beginning of something? Sort of like Nixon in China, only with more bling?

• Vote for Dennis Rodman here

Memorial, nominated by Shaun Walker, Moscow correspondent

Memorial was founded as the Soviet Union was collapsing and over the subsequent quarter of a century has done an enormous amount of work to ensure that the crimes of the Soviet period, including Joseph Stalin's Terror, are not forgotten. In a country with few memorials to the victims of the Terror or the Gulag, and little appetite to re-examine the darker aspects of its past, Memorial's activists and historians painstakingly catalogue documents, and have a database featuring over a million names.

It has also worked on modern-day rights abuses, for a long period operating an office in Grozny, investigating among other things crimes carried out by paramilitary groups loyal to the regime.

None of this activity is fashionable in contemporary Russia, where the official narrative glosses over the crimes of the Soviet period, and those who investigate modern-day crimes can pay the price dearly. The Memorial activist Natalia Estemirova was kidnapped from outside her house in Chechnya in 2009 and murdered.

Memorial has also been targeted by a controversial new law on NGOs that receive foreign funding, which demands they register as "foreign agents", and has had its offices raided on numerous occasions.

• Vote for Memorial here

Alex Aan, nominated by Kate Hodal, south-east Asia correspondent

Photograph: Kate Hodal

I'd put forward Alex Aan, a 31-year-old former civil servant who has spent the past year in an Indonesian jail on charges related to the fact that he is an atheist, the first of his kind to be jailed for his beliefs. Designated a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International, Aan represents the struggles of modern-day Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation, which officially recognises six world religions but is increasingly home to religious clashes.

• Vote for Alex Aan here