An anti-poverty campaigner and a bank in Bangladesh have won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. The purpose of the prize has become muddled. It may be better to withhold it next time

BRAVERY is a characteristic shared by most winners of the Nobel Peace Prize. On Friday October 13th, the Norwegian part of the Nobel Institute (a Swedish body that dishes out the other coveted prizes, for science and literature) named the recipient of the 2006 peace award. An unofficial shortlist included a pair of Irish rock stars who have received a lot of attention for trying to promote development in Africa, a Finnish diplomat who works at the UN and who has lobbied for peace in Indonesia and a Vietnamese Buddhist. In fact the award was given to Muhammad Yunus and Grameen bank in Bangladesh, which promotes lending to the poorest, especially women.

But the Nobel committee could have made a braver, more difficult, choice by declaring that there would be no recipient at all. That might ruin a good party—each year the lucky winner (who also gets a cash prize of $1.3m or so) is honoured with a lavish award ceremony in Oslo, Norway's capital, given a commemorative medal, and attention is shone on his particular good cause. Some recent examples include a campaign to ban landmines; the promotion of peace in Northern Ireland; efforts to bring democracy to Myanmar (which used to be called Burma).

Withholding the prize for a year, or possibly five, might seem rather callous. But the institute would not be suggesting that the world has become sufficiently peaceful now. Some do argue that wars are generally in decline. Last year a think-tank in Canada released a “Human Security Report” which noted that 100-odd wars have expired since 1988. Their study found that wars and genocides have become less frequent since 1991, that the value of the international arms trade has slumped by a third (between 1990 and 2003), and that refugee numbers have roughly halved (between 1992 and 2003). Yet, despite all that, there are clearly enough problems today—Darfur, Sri Lanka, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, international terrorism—to keep the hardest-working peace promoters busy.

The reason for the institute to withhold the prize, instead, would be to preserve its value. There is a risk that its worth is being eroded as the institute scrambles to find an eye-catching recipient every year. There is the problem of Buggins's turn, an expectation (as with some other prizes) that the award should rotate between regions of the world. This year it is Asia, last year the recipient was from the Middle East, the year before from Africa.

Some recipients seem less than deserving. Vietnam's Le Duc Tho declined the award in 1973 when he was asked to share it with America's Henry Kissinger. The two had signed a ceasefire agreement that year, but fighting continued in Vietnam for another two years. The recent decision to give the prize to a Kenyan environmentalist, Wangari Maathai, was also odd: she has done a lot to plant trees in Kenya, but not much to promote peace. Worse, she holds bizarre views on AIDS, suggesting that HIV was created by evil scientists to kill black people. This year's winner is an admirable anti-poverty campaigner, but it is a stretch to call him or the Grameen bank peacemakers.

In searching out individuals to praise for a variety of good deeds, to make celebrities of the well-meaning in various walks of life, is to confuse the purpose of the prize: to promote peace. The organisers could recall that on 19 occasions since the prize was first given out in 1901, the institute declared that it could find no fitting winner. During much of the first and second world wars, for example, no winner was named. But the last time the institute dared to do that was in 1972. What has changed since then, one might suspect, is that the institute has found it has a great need—for marketing purposes perhaps—to give out the prize. The challenge, for the next few years, will be to find the bravery to hold back.