Such reports should drop the idea of ranking countries and instead focus on the rise or fall in per-country scores relative to their previous scores.
Whenever countries are ranked against each other, discussions inevitably focus on the relative ranks and ignore the underlying causes of any drop in scores.
When a country moves up in rank mostly because some other countries moved down, it feels odd to the people there who wonder why they ranked higher without any improvements on the ground. Nationalist governments tend to claim the higher rank is because of their policies, knowing that their people most likely won't study the changes in score components of previous years.
And adding to that, at minimum countries need to be evaluated by their parts. In most of the countries currently at war there are parts were it is relatively safe (but still worse than at peace time), and some parts where it is literally hell. Averaging them all doesn't make sense really.
Worth noting that "peace" here doesn't mean "safe to live in". Instead it includes both internal conflict, but also things like military preparedness and access to heavy and nuclear weapons.
That's why unsafe but underdeveloped nations rank higher than some countries that are often considered domestically safe.
Yeah, it seems more like a "warmongering index", something like "belligerent intent * amount of military power to realize that intent".
At least that would explain how "Palestine" ranks as (slightly) more peaceful than Israel even though it's probably one of the most "unsafe" places on the planet right now.
Also Russia has the highest score but has neither the world's most powerful military nor would it be the least safe country to live in. But it likely is the country with the largest army that is currently engaged in open, offensive warfare.
It's a useful thing to measure for sure, but if that's what's measured, shouldn't there be more focus on the alliances and power relations between the countries? E.g. all the countries are listed individually here, but some are members of NATO, some of BRICS or SCO, some have bilateral military agreements, etc.
How would this deal with "proxy conflicts" and non-state actors?
If this had been published a few years before, would the breakaway Donbass republics have counted as countries? (If yes, they might even have counted as relatively "peaceful" as there was no reason for them to attack anything - their existence was the attack)
Would Hezbollah be counted towards Lebanon, towards Iran, towards Palestine or not counted at all?
Sir, I live in a "developing" (that designation is forever) country, where traffic is uncontrollable and haphazard, stray dogs roam under the protection of the government, and a flyover bridge can fall on your head at any point of the road.
Hypothetically, I would rather live in a country like the US. I'm sure the machinery of US is good enough to protect its inland citizens when they wage wars on less fortunate ones for whatever reason.
This is a nitpick but it's a bit awkward to call something "Global Peace Index" and then have it be a number where lower scores indicate more peace. It seems like it would make more sense to invert the scores.
Maybe. I think one thing that contributes to my interpretation is that "peace" is something you can have more or less of, but you can't have more or less Erdős. So seeing "Erdős number" I just think "measuring something about Erdős", but seeing "peace index" I get a slightly more specific feeling of "measuring the amount/quantity/duration of peace".
> Norway experienced the largest deterioration in peacefulness in
the region, which was primarily caused by a substantial
deterioration on the Militarisation domain. The military
expenditure (% GDP) indicator deteriorated by 31.1 per cent and
the weapons exports indicator deteriorated by 145 per cent. In
2024, the government unanimously adopted a new long-term
defence strategy that will substantially increase the total
defence budget over the next 12 years.15 The Safety and Security
domain saw a slight improvement of 0.08 per cent while all the
indicators in the Ongoing Conflict domain had no change.
Despite its fall in overall peacefulness, Norway has the second
most peaceful ranking in the world on the Safety and Security
domain.
I too found Norways placement on the list interesting. I lived there for 2 years. It doesn’t come much more chill than that.
Looking at the indices, while Norway is generally low on all the indicators, it’s maxed out on weapons exports and weapons imports. Not sure why that is? Because NATO traffics through there a bunch?
Meanwhile, next door Sweden ranks lower in these categories, even though Saab makes air fighters and the like. Weird numbers indeed.
Croatia is a great country, and so are the others from the former Yugoslavia.
But Croatia’s “peacefulness”
depends very heavily on the of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia.
I feel like the target audience for this, the freedom and democracy and crime indexes etc is the citizens of the world not the current leaders. Its about informing people that better and safer exists.
I don't know if this is happening for anyone else, but Greenland is missing, which is deeply and darkly amusing for many reasons, least of all the size of the omission.
"Positive Peace is defined as the attitudes, institutions and structures that create and sustain peaceful societies. The Positive Peace Index measures the level of societal resilience of a nation or region according."
And the United States scores very high. Losing a bit of credibility there.
How the hell is Nepal more peaceful than China or Bolivia? Last week the country has had extremely violent protests, with widespread vandalism and arson leading to inadvertent murder of political leaders, as well as many prison breakouts.
I was right there during the protests (as a tourist) and it was such a bizarre situation.
The thing started with the police _killing_ more than 10 children. And after that the crowd went after places like police stations, some palaces and the parliament. Most politicians fled, but the ones that were caught up were mostly bitten up, not killed.
As someone from Eastern Europe, who lived through the fall of the Soviet Union, it all seemed remarkably chill and peaceful - people were really after justice, not vengeance.
Prisons were mostly filled by political prisoners, though some bad apples took advantage to escape as well.
Being just a few kilometres away from the epicentre of things, it all felt very chill, people on the streets were very happy, police were ok, military was smiling and chatty - they were giving people water and trying to “look helpful”
Just the media wants to portray chaos cause that’s what’s driving the clicks, but the situation on the ground was quite ok.
The people did a quick *discord* vote, chose an interim president - who is someone everyone in the country agrees is one of the few incorruptible and honest people, and they will apparently have a proper election at some point when things settle down.
As “revolution” goes this seems like the most sane one I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a few …
Protest are often like this. Where it’s going on it is very intense but just on a side street people can be sitting quietly sipping latte like nothing special is happening.
The police also killed 19 people but your comment doesn’t mention that.
In addition the military has not taken over, but currently seems to be honoring the demand of the protestors for new leadership and addressing the widespread corruption in the nation.
It’s too early to call, to be sure. But I’m hopeful that there can be a peaceful transition from here towards something better for Nepal.
The components of the index are all sourced from stuff like various UN agencies or Amnesty reports, so even if the report is compiled instantly, it probably trails by 6 months on average.
If you click on a county it gives you a breakdown. China scored 5/5 for Nuclear and Heavy weapons, 4.5/5 for political terror, and 4/5 for neighboring country relations.
Papua New Guinea more peaceful than the United States, huh? Even experienced travel vloggers barely visit that country because of how much violence there is.
Sure Papua New Guinea scores 5/5 on the "Violent Crime" assessment (to the US's 2/5), but the US incarceration rate is 5/5, while Papua New Guinea only scores 1.5/5.
The US also has much more weapons exports, and external military involvement.
People deciding where to travel are largely thinking about "violent crime" levels moreso than "how many fighter jets does this country sell"
This report tries to also take into account things like "Military size, expenditure, and weapon exports", which surely indicates a non-peaceful nation, even if on the ground citizens can live peacefully.
If the definition of "peace" includes nation-level involvement in conflict, then I think it's very fair to argue that the US isn't a peaceful country. Papua New Guinea is not providing significant military support to multiple wars at once. The US certainly is.
Do you realize how much violence there is in the US? The assassination of Charlie Kirk, stabbing of ukrainian refugee in the subway, the beheading of an indian man in Dallas. And those are just this month.
yeah, and Thailand and Cambodia currently have a border dispute with military engagements resulting in death of soldiers and attacks on civilian buildings, with both sides activating their military in response.
and yet they are more peaceful than the USA.
The border dispute has been going on for decades though, but just recently escalated to deaths.
The russia had started over a dozen wars and committed multiple genocides, one of which is globally recognized, all in just the last hundred years. Ukraine had only been defending in at least the last three centuries.
This rating is bs, because the methodology doesn't make sense.
Well, I’m simply making the point that until recently programming required a certain amount of rigor and precision that is no longer necessary because of AI. And that now we can do the sort of hand-wavy, p-hacky work that has been available to social scientists for decades.
Most of the composite indexes of this kind are similarly meaningless. It's certainly not just the domain of NGOs.
But to be fair, if it makes people to stop and look why they have different preconceived ideas, I think it's a positive. For example I didn't know that Norway is so militaristic.
I’ve spent significant time in Africa. South Africa is higher than the US despite being a place where everyone has razor wire topped walls around their houses, and having the 5th highest murder rate in the world.
The US has problems. I myself was the victim of a violent robbery 15 years ago. But the idea that it’s less peaceful than South Africa, Lesotho, Sierra Leone, and only marginally more peaceful than Haiti? Come on…
The index is not just about "how peaceful is the average citizen's life", which is one part of it, but also includes other things like how many wars the country participates in, how much of their government budget goes to military, etc. You shouldn't get a good "Global Peace Index Score" while exporting violence across the globe.
Whenever countries are ranked against each other, discussions inevitably focus on the relative ranks and ignore the underlying causes of any drop in scores.
When a country moves up in rank mostly because some other countries moved down, it feels odd to the people there who wonder why they ranked higher without any improvements on the ground. Nationalist governments tend to claim the higher rank is because of their policies, knowing that their people most likely won't study the changes in score components of previous years.