Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images 
 
 Earlier this week, I argued that the Nobel Peace Prize should go to nobody, “as an acknowledgment that the most notable eruptions of violence have been so grimly predictable, the result of years of individual and collective failures by governments and international institutions.” Despite that sentiment, I certainly don’t object to the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s decision to award this year’s prize to Malala Yousafzai and Kailash Satyarthi for, as the announcement put it, “their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education.” 
 
 Joshua Keating Joshua Keating is a staff writer at Slate focusing on international affairs. 
 
 The most surprising thing about the award may be how unsurprising it is. The last few peace prizes—particularly the ones given to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons last year, the EU in 2012, and Barack Obama in 2009—have been unexpected curveballs. Yousafzai, by contrast, was mentioned as a strong favorite in nearly every story leading up to Friday’s prize announcement. 
 
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 Satyarthi, a 60-year-old campaigner against child labor in India, is much less well-known. He’s known for mounting raids on factories employing children—sometimes facing down armed guards—as well as running a rehabilitation center for liberated children, organizing the Global March Against Child Labour, and setting up a certification system to ensure that carpets are made without child labor. 
 
 While Yousafzai and Satyarthi are both admirable and inspiring figures, I think it’s worth stepping back and assessing the Nobel committee’s mission. In its early years, the Nobel Peace Prize was most often given to honor a specific accomplishment in peacemaking—a treaty drafted or a conflict ended. (This is why some individuals not exactly known for their pacifism—Yasser Arafat and Henry Kissinger to name a couple—have peace prizes.) But overall, it’s more often been given to individuals involved in the struggle against a particular pressing problem or injustice. (Think Al Gore or Aung San Suu Kyi.) This year is obviously an example of this second type of prize. 
 
 While the (somewhat inexplicable) prestige of the Nobel can certainly bring attention to worthy individuals, there’s less evidence to suggest it helps their causes. For instance, the prize given to human rights activist Liu Xiaobo in 2010 has probably made it less likely that Chinese authorities will let him out of prison. 
 
 Some also find the western media’s fascination with Yousafzai a little troubling. When she was passed over for the prize last year, blogger and technology researcher Zeynep Tufekci argued in a widely read post that in the Malala narrative “our multi-decade involvement in Pakistan is reduced to finding a young woman we admire that we all want to take home as if to put on a shelf to adore.” Whereas, she continued, “what the world is desperately lacking, and the Nobel Committee, for once, rewarded, is the kind of boring, institutional work of peace that advances the lives of people.” 
 
 There is something irritatingly smug and condescending about some of the coverage of “the bravest girl in the world.” It was a particular low point when, on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart said “I want to adopt you” to a young woman who’s spoken very publicly about the support she’s received from her father—a pretty brave guy in his own right. 
 
 But that’s our problem, not hers. My guess is that someone’s who’s comfortable telling the president of the United States to his face that his military policies are fueling terrorism isn’t going to let herself be reduced to a cuddly caricature. And in any case, it was probably wise for the Nobel committee to pair the very young global celebrity with a relatively unheralded activist with years of work behind him. 
 
 The committee gave its last two awards to institutions—the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and the European Union—and not particularly popular ones at that. In a year in which governments and international institutions seemed particularly ineffectual in dealing with mounting violence and instability, giving the award to individuals seems appropriate. Dividing the peace prize between an Indian and a Pakistani also seems like a deliberate statement at a time when tensions are once again escalating between the perennial adversaries. ||||| Malala Yousafzai, who is seventeen years old, and Kailash Satyarthi, who is sixty, were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday morning—for, in the committee's words, "their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education." 
 
 Satyarthi, who is Indian, is a man who has fought for children for decades; Malala, who is Pakistani, is a child, and a fighter herself. There was some thought, ahead of the announcement, that Malala, as she is known, would be awarded the prize alone. She is more famous than Satyarthi. Two years ago, gunmen from the Taliban got on her school bus and shot her in the head, shattering her skull—an attack she answered by becoming one of the world's clearest voices for girls' education. Satyarthi has survived physical attacks, too, and has led raids on factories that hold small children as bonded laborers. His group, Bachpan Bachao Andolan, has set up schools where those children can be set on a different path. According to press reports, he has worked directly with more than eighty thousand children, and has fought to change the conditions and chances of hundreds of thousands more. Satyarthi has also addressed the role of Western consumers who buy rugs woven with small fingers, helping to set up a labelling system, called Goodweave. Both of these people deserved the award individually. The combination of the two laureates gives it a nuanced character—and a different kind of power than if it had gone to either of them alone. 
 
 It is past time to stop seeing Malala as simply the girl who survived, as a symbol. (The Times called her a “global emblem.”) She is a girl who leads: who addressed the United Nations on her sixteenth birthday; who amazes Jon Stewart and asks Barack Obama about drones. (Watch her U.N. speech for a view of her matchlessly inspiring presence, and also for her words against violence.) She was so young when the Taliban set out to assassinate her. The gunmen targeted her—they shouted her name—because she had written on a blog for the BBC about how girls should go to school. They shot and injured the girl she was sitting with, too. In the days that followed, hundreds of people lined up outside the hospital where doctors were trying to save her, offering to donate blood. She would eventually be brought to a Pakistani military hospital and then airlifted to Birmingham, England, for specialized surgery. Looking at what Malala has accomplished since the day she got on that bus, one can imagine, someday, people lining up outside a polling station, to vote for her. 
 
 The threats against Malala have not ended; they simply haven't silenced her. She is not only a witness whose story warms our hearts. She is an activist, and soon will be an adult, who will, one hopes, also make some of her casual admirers uncomfortable by asking for more than wonder at her bravery. She is a compelling speaker and an adept organizer. The worst insult to Malala would be to regard her as nothing more than a child performer for peace, kept in a moment we want to keep hearing about. 
 
 Satyarthi is not Malala's babysitter: he is her counterpart. The committee said, in its announcement, that it "regards it as an important point for a Hindu and a Muslim, an Indian and a Pakistani, to join in a common struggle for education and against extremism." If the committee had bypassed Malala, as it did last year, one suspicion would have been that it was afraid of positioning the Nobel as a rebuke to the Islamic world alone. Perhaps some element of that was at work, but if so, the solution is a valuable one. Here, again, complexity adds strength to the committee's message. The struggle for the rights of children is not just a matter of feeling sorry for the people of this country or that; it is a common interrogation. There is plenty of complicity—and we are not exempt. Satyarthi also has an economic mission that challenges the West. What does it mean to set up a factory in a country where children don't go to school, or to buy clothes without looking at the labels? For that matter, in the United States, what does it mean when children are pulled into the criminal-justice system and not treated as children at all? Whose children are all children? 
 
 The Peace Prize has often been broadly understood; children’s rights fits well into its mandate of increasing understanding between nations. It’s not only an abstract matter, though. War takes children out of school, whether they are refugees, as in Syria, or targets of attack, like the Nigerian girls kidnapped by Boko Haram. Children who have no other options are also likelier recruits for war. The economic exploitation of children is also raw abuse, backed up by coercion and often violence. (Satyarthi, in a speech, described a factory where “if they tried to run away, they were hanged upside down on trees and beaten with stones.... Many of them had been burned with cigarettes.”) School is a rebuke to war; so is caring about the futures of other people’s children. 
 
 One point that the Nobel committee, in its citation, somewhat underplays is the question of gender. The announcement mentions Malala's particular commitment to girls' education, but the framework is children as children. Whatever its words, though, this should be a prize that is also about gender, because the exploitation of children is tied up in gender issues, too. Satyarthi's work has also included campaigns against child marriage. 
 
 The Nobel committee has given an award to a seventeen-year-old, the youngest Peace Prize laureate ever. In one way, that is an act of faith about what and who Malala Yousafzai will become—not only about who she has been. (In her case, it might be less of a gamble than giving the prize to a President who has just been elected.) Any award for children—to children—is a bet on a future that one can't quite predict, but which might be better. That's just as it should be.
– While Slate's Joshua Keating argued previously that the Nobel Peace Prize should go to no one this year, he's not about to begrudge Malala Yousafzai, who was named a co-recipient today. The 17-year-old Pakistani activist is certainly worthy, he writes at the website. Just one thing, though: Can we please do away with the "irritatingly smug and condescending" coverage of her being "the bravest girl in the world," he asks. It's a disservice to her, and it belittles what she's up to these days. The good news is that the poise she has shown on the world stage, along with her willingness to challenge leaders including President Obama, suggests that she "isn’t going to let herself be reduced to a cuddly caricature." Which is the way it should be, observes Amy Davidson at the New Yorker. "It is past time to stop seeing Malala as simply the girl who survived, as a symbol," writes Davidson. "She is a girl who leads." Consider that death threats against the teen have not stopped, but nor have they silenced her. "The worst insult to Malala would be to regard her as nothing more than a child performer for peace, kept in a moment we want to keep hearing about." She became the youngest-ever recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize today, but it's as much about her future as her past. Click for Davidson's full post, or for Keating's full post.