The 2025 Right Livelihood Award has gone to activists and organizers from Sudan, Myanmar, Taiwan and the Pacific Islands, putting collective action and civil resistance at the center of this year’s prize.
The Stockholm-based foundation announced that the winners include Pacific Island Students Fighting Climate Change and Julian Aguon, Justice for Myanmar, Taiwan’s Audrey Tang and Sudan’s Emergency Response Rooms network. AP says the foundation considered 159 nominees from 67 countries this year, underscoring the scale of the field and the range of causes represented in the final selection.
The awards carry a clear political and humanitarian message. The Pacific Islands laureates were recognized for taking climate justice to the International Court of Justice and turning survival into a rights-based argument. Justice for Myanmar was honored for exposing the financial architecture and corporate support that help sustain Myanmar’s military rulers. Audrey Tang was cited for using digital technology to empower citizens and repair democratic trust. In Sudan, the Emergency Response Rooms were recognized for building a mutual-aid model that continues to support millions of people amid war and state collapse.
What links the four winners is not geography but method. Each group or individual is working in an environment where formal institutions are weak, contested or under pressure. The foundation’s language makes that point directly, arguing that authoritarianism, division and climate disaster are pushing communities toward collective responses rather than top-down fixes.
AP notes that the Right Livelihood Award was created in 1980 by Swedish-German philanthropist Jakob von Uexkull because he believed some forms of human-rights and environmental work were being overlooked by the Nobel Prize system. The prize has since become an annual fixture just ahead of the Nobel announcements, often spotlighting campaigns that are more activist than ceremonial.
This year’s list also fits a broader pattern of recognition. Previous recipients include Ukrainian human rights defender Oleksandra Matviichuk, Congolese surgeon Denis Mukwege and Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg. Matviichuk and Mukwege later won Nobel Peace Prizes, giving the award a reputation as an early signal of globally significant civic work.
The AP report says the laureates will receive their awards on December 2 in Stockholm. It does not give the prize amount, which suggests the symbolic value of the honor may be more important than the money attached to it.
For the recipients, the prize is a public acknowledgment that organizing, documenting abuses and building local resilience can be as consequential as holding office. For the foundation, it is a reminder that the prize is meant to elevate work that is practical, risky and often invisible until a major international platform brings it into view.
