Global Peace Index



The Global Peace Index is an attempt to measure the relative position of nations’ and regions’ peacefulness. It is maintained by the Economist, an international panel of peace experts from peace institutes and think tanks, together with the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, University of Sydney, Australia. The list was launched in May 2007, and is claimed to be the first study to rank countries around the world according to their peacefulness. The study is the brainchild of Australian entrepreneur Steve Killelea and is endorsed by individuals such as the Dalai Lama, archbishop Desmond Tutu, and former US president Jimmy Carter. Factors examined by the authors include internal factors such as levels of violence and crime within the country and factors in a country's external relations such as military expenditure and wars.

Methodology
The research team was headed by The Economist Intelligence Unit in conjunction with academics and experts in the field of peace. They measured countries' peacefulness based on wide range of indicators, 24 in all. A table of the indicators is below. In the table, UCDP stands for the Uppsala Conflict Data Program maintained by the University of Uppsala in Sweden, EIU for The Economist Intelligence Unit, UNSCT for the United Nations Survey of Criminal Trends and Operations of Criminal Justice Systems, ICPS is the International Center for Prison Studies at King's College London, IISS for the International Institute for Strategic Studies publication The Military Balance 2007, SIPRI for the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute Arms Transfers Database, and BICC for the Bonn International Center for Conversion.

Indicators not already ranked on a 1 to 5 scale were converted by using the following formula: x=(x-Min(x))/(Max(x)-Min(x)) where Max(x) and Min(x) are the highest and lowest values for that indicator of the countries ranked in the index. The 0 to 1 scores that resulted were then converted to the 1 to 5 scale. Individual indicators were then weighted according to the research team's judgment of their importance. The scores were then tabulated into two weighted sub-indices: internal peace, weighted at 60% of a country's final score, and external peace, weighted at 40% of a country's final score. After compiling the Index, the researchers examined it for patterns in order to identify the "drivers" that make for peaceful societies as measured by the index. They found in general that peaceful countries often shared high levels of democracy and transparency of government, education and material well-being, as is the case with Norway, New Zealand, and many of the European countries that ranked among the more peaceful nations on the index. The United States was one prominent exception to this rule largely due to its engagement in warfare, high military expenditure, and high levels of incarceration and homicide.

Statistical analysis was applied to discover more specific drivers of peace. Specifically, the research team looked for indicators that were included and excluded from the index that had high levels of correlation with the overall score and rank of countries. Among the statistically significant indicators that were not used in the analysis were the functionality of a country's government, regional integration, hostility to foreigners, importance of religion in national life, and GDP per capita.

Notably absent from the study are Belarus, Iceland, many African nations, Mongolia, North Korea and Afghanistan. They were not included because reliable data for the 24 indicators was not available.

Criticism and response to criticism
The Economist, in publishing the index, admitted that, "the index will run into some flak." Specifically, according to The Economist, the weighting of military expenditure "may seem to give heart to freeloaders: countries that enjoy peace precisely because others (often the USA) care for their defence." However, the magazine goes on to argue that the true utility of the index may lie not in its specific rankings of countries now, but in how those rankings change over time, thus tracking when and how countries become more or less peaceful.

The Peace Index has been criticised for not including indicators specifically relating to violence against women and children. Riane Eisler, writing in the Christian Science Monitor, argued that, "to put it mildly, this blind spot makes the index very inaccurate." She mentions a number of specific cases, including Egypt, where she claims 90 percent of women are subject to genital mutilation, China, where, she says, "female infanticide is still a problem," and Chile, where 26% of women, "suffered at least one episode of violence by a partner, according to a 2000 UNICEF study."

The Index has received endorsements from a number of major international figures, including the Dalai Lama, archbishop Desmond Tutu, and former United States President Jimmy Carter. Steve Killelea, the Australian philanthropist who conceived the idea of the Index, argues that the Index, "is a wake-up call for leaders around the globe."

2007 Global Peace Index rankings
Nations considered the most peaceful have lower index scores.