Quantifying Peace and its Benefits The Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) is an independent, non-partisan, non-profit think tank dedicated to shifting the world’s focus to peace as a positive, achievable, and tangible measure of human well-being and progress. IEP achieves its goals by developing new conceptual frameworks to define peacefulness; providing metrics for measuring peace; and uncovering the relationships between business, peace and prosperity as well as promoting a better understanding of the cultural, economic and political factors that create peace. IEP has offices in Sydney, New York and Mexico City. It works with a wide range of partners internationally and collaborates with intergovernmental organizations on measuring and communicating the economic value of peace. For more information visit www.economicsandpeace.org CONTENTS EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 2 1 RESULTS AND FINDINGS 5 Highlights 2015 Global Peace Index rankings 8 Regional overview 10 Risers and fallers 16 GPI domain and indicator: Annual changes 20 Trends in the Global Peace Index domains 22 Ongoing domestic and international conflict 23 Societal safety and security 29 Militarisation 35 2 TRENDS IN PEACE 43 Highlights 45 Eight-year trends 46 Indicator trends 49 Regional trends 55 Global distribution of peace 59 3 GLOBAL ECONOMIC VALUE OF PEACE 63 Highlights 65 Conceptual overview and methodology 68 Global violence containment: Results and trends 72 Trends in global violence containment expenditure 74 Countries with the highest cost of violence containment as a per cent of GDP 77 Countries with the highest cost of violence containment expenditure 78 4 POSITIVE PEACE 79 Why Positive Peace is transformational 81 Defining and measuring Positive Peace 82 Positive Peace and resistance movements 91 Positive Peace and the close link to other development goals 94 Five post-conflict countries with largest Positive Peace improvements 97 ANNEXES 99 Annex A: GPI methodology 100 Annex B: GPI indicator sources, definitions and scoring criteria 103 Annex C: Violence containment costs by country 112 Annex D: 2015 GPI Domain Scores 114 REFERENCES 117 END NOTES 120 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY This is the ninth edition of the Global Peace Index (GPI), which ranks the nations of the world according to their level of peacefulness. The index is composed of 23 qualitative and quantitative indicators from highly respected sources and ranks 162 independent states, covering 99.6 per cent of the world’s population. The index gauges global peace using three broad themes: the level of safety and security in society, the extent of domestic and international conflict and the degree of militarisation. In addition to presenting the findings from the 2015 GPI and MENA now ranks as the most violent region, overtaking South its eight-year trend analysis, this year’s report provides an Asia from last year’s GPI. Yet again, Europe maintained its updated methodology to account for the economic impact of position as the most peaceful region in the world, supported violence on the global economy. The report also contains a new by a lack of domestic and external conflicts. It was also the analysis on Positive Peace and describes its relationship to region that experienced the largest improvement in its score development and other significant and positive societal compared with 2014, continuing its eight-year trend of outcomes. A detailed thematic analysis of the three improving peacefulness. aforementioned domains of the GPI is also included. This year Guinea-Bissau had the largest improvement in peace, Last year the global GPI score remained stable. However, resulting in a rise of 24 places in the rankings to 120th. The next while the average level of global peacefulness was stable, a four largest improvements occurred in Cote d’Ivoire, Egypt, number of indicators and countries did deteriorate while Tajikistan and Benin. A common theme among the largest others improved. Four out of the nine geographical regions improvers was a fall in the level of organised conflict, which experienced an improvement in peace: Europe, North America, occurred in all of the four aforementioned African nations. sub-Saharan Africa and Central America and the Caribbean. Cancelling out its strong improvement in the 2014 edition of The other five regions became less peaceful. The most the GPI, Libya experienced the largest deterioration this year. substantial changes in the Index occurred in the Middle East Its score deteriorated substantially and consequently it fell 13 and North Africa (MENA) where several countries suffered places down to 149th to become the 14th least peaceful country. from an upsurge in violence related to sectarian strife and civil Unsurprisingly the second biggest decline was recorded for the conflicts, resulting in the region being ranked as the least Ukraine, due to the conflict between Russian separatists and peaceful in the world. the Ukrainian government as well as the instability caused by The societal safety and security domain improved slightly last Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Other countries that year, driven by falls in the homicide rate and the likelihood of substantially deteriorated were Djibouti and Niger which fell violent demonstrations. The improvements in homicide rates 42 and 28 places, respectively. mainly reflected data updates in some high homicide countries. Over the past eight years the average country score This improvement was counterbalanced by deteriorations in deteriorated 2.4 percent, highlighting that on average the world the ongoing conflict and militarisation domains, owing to has become slightly less peaceful. However, this decrease in increases in deaths from internal conflict, non-payment of UN peacefulness has not been evenly spread, with 86 counties peacekeeping dues, and a continuing deterioration in the deteriorating while 76 improved. MENA has suffered the largest impact of terrorism indicator. decline of any region in the world, deteriorating 11 per cent over the past eight years. Iceland is the most peaceful country, with the ten highest ranking nations in the GPI all being stable democracies. Nordic The eight-year downward trend in peacefulness has been driven and Alpine countries are particularly well represented. predominately by the deterioration in indicators of internal Asia-Pacific is also represented at the top, with New Zealand peacefulness. Of the five key indicators which deteriorated by ranked 4th, Japan at 8th and Australia at 9th. more than five per cent, four are internal and one external: GLOBAL PEACE INDEX 2015 2 refugees and IDPs as a percentage of the population, deaths from internal conflict, the impact of terrorism, the likelihood of violent demonstrations and perceptions of criminality. The deterioration in the indicators measuring the number of refugees and IDPs and the impact of terrorism is most concerning. The latest UNHCR estimates indicate that more than 50 million people are now either refugees or internally displaced because of conflict and violence, which is the highest number since the end of the Second World War. A third of people displaced by conflict inside their own countries in 2014 are in Iraq and Syria alone. Terrorism has grown steadily over the last decade, a trend that shows no sign of abating. Deaths caused by terrorism increased only accounts for less than 0.17 per cent of violence by 61 per cent in 2013, which resulted in almost 18,000 people containment expenditure. being killed in terrorist attacks. Of those deaths, 82 per cent occurred in just five countries: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, The report outlines new findings on Positive Peace, Nigeria and Syria. The threat of terrorism has also affected many highlighting its impact on peace, development and other of the world’s most peaceful countries, with terrorist attacks important societal goals. In societies where Positive Peace is occurring in France, Denmark and Australia in the last year. stronger, developmental goals are more likely to be achieved. These societies are more resilient when faced with crisis and On the positive side, several indicators of external peacefulness have fewer grievances. They are more likely to achieve actually improved over the last eight years. Relations with non-violent positive outcomes when faced with resistance neighbouring countries has grown stronger, particularly in movements and are more likely to adapt and make concessions South America, financial contributions to UN peacekeeping to reconcile grievances. Additionally, Positive Peace is also funding has improved and the number and intensity of external statistically associated with many other outcomes considered conflicts has fallen as many countries wound down their desirable: stronger business environments, better performance military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. on well-being measures, gender equality and better It is important to note that peace is becoming more unevenly performance on ecological measures. distributed. While Europe continued its long-term trend of The report also includes a thematic analysis of the three domains improvement, the Middle East continued its recent trend of of the GPI: deterioration, further increasing the distance between the most and least peaceful regions and countries. In Europe and Ongoing domestic and international conflicts: in many other developed countries, homicide rates and other This section comments on the six major MENA conflicts forms of interpersonal violence continue to drop and are at occurring in Syria, Iraq,