The Right Livelihood Foundation awarded its 2026 prizes to four recipients whose work directly confronts power concentration: AI researcher Timnit Gebru, Pakistani lawyer Jalila Haider, the Rural Women's Assembly of Southern Africa, and Georgia's Young Lawyers' Association (GYLA). Selected from 200 nominations across 72 countries, the winners share a common thread — building institutional capacity for people pushed to the margins by corporate, state, and patriarchal systems. Gebru's recognition is the most globally legible. The Ethiopian-born, Eritrean-heritage researcher founded the Distributed AI Research Institute after her 2020 departure from Google, where she co-led the Ethical AI team. The triggering event: a paper on risks of bias in large language models that Google wanted retracted or stripped of her name. She refused absent specific guarantees, and according to the Right Livelihood jury, was dismissed. The award honors her ongoing work challenging concentrated power in AI and advocating for technology rooted in justice and lived experience. Jalila Haider's prize highlights a different vector of systemic exclusion. As the first female lawyer from Pakistan's Hazara community, she has built a legal practice defending ethnic, gender, and religious minorities as well as refugees against state repression and ethnic violence. The foundation credits her with securing justice for thousands targeted or ignored by those in power — a one-person institutional counterweight in a context where the legal system itself is often the instrument of marginalization. The Rural Women's Assembly represents scale. With more than 178,000 small-scale farmers across 11 Southern African countries, the organization defends land rights, seed sovereignty, and bodily autonomy against what the jury describes as corporate and patriarchal dispossession. Their seed preservation work — reproducing and exchanging local varieties — is a direct defense of agricultural commons against the enclosure of genetic resources by agribusiness. GYLA, founded in 1994, operates on the institutional resilience front. The Georgian Young Lawyers' Association has functioned as what the foundation calls the moral compass of Georgian society, building and safeguarding democratic institutions during an ongoing autocratic crackdown. This is legal infrastructure defense — maintaining the civic tools that populations need when governments turn hostile. The Right Livelihood Award, created in 1980 by Swedish-German philanthropist Jakob von Uexkull, exists explicitly to honor work the Nobel Prizes overlook. That framing matters: it positions these awards not as a consolation category but as a corrective lens, recognizing systemic work that doesn't fit the Nobel's preference for discrete achievements within established disciplines. The common architecture across all four winners is countervailing power — building durable institutional capacity that checks extraction by states, corporations, and patriarchal systems. Whether that's Gebru forcing transparency on AI firms, Haider litigating against state violence, the Rural Women's Assembly defending seed commons, or GYLA maintaining democratic infrastructure under authoritarian pressure, the through-line is the same: generative resistance that creates capability rather than merely protesting its absence.
