Srilanka, Oct. 19 -- When Maria Corina Machado's name appeared under the gilded headline "Nobel Peace Prize, 2025," a strange, almost tragic laughter echoed across parts of the world that have felt the heavy hand of empire. Not because it was unexpected-these days, the Nobel Committee seems drawn to contradiction-but because it was so morbidly predictable. Machado's coronation as a peacemaker marks not the triumph of peace, but its linguistic extinction. It confirms what so many in the Global South already know: that "peace," in the lexicon of Western power, has been emptied of ethics and swollen with geopolitics.

To call Machado a "symbol of peace" is to stretch language past recognition. She is, rather, the embodiment of a political ec...