Measuring Peace and Justice

Some people divide the world into optimists and pessimists, into positive and negative thinkers, into “glass half-full and glass half-empty” types. Those people will probably try to tell you that it’s negative to focus on “the bad stuff” and conclude from this that the world is becoming an ever more violent, dangerous and heartless place and that this kind of thinking is, in the end, merely a perception brought on by ever-increasing connectivity with the rest of the world. They’ll tell you that there was always violence and chaos in certain parts of the world, but that those of us who didn’t live in those places simply didn’t know about it, whereas, today, everybody’s connected to everybody else all the time, so unlike before, we now know what’s going on in the rest of the world—instead of being blithely ignorant, one might conclude. Therefore, they will tell you, the idea that the world is growing more violent and war-like by the day is a mere erroneous perception, not a fact.

So are these eternal optimists right? Are we others simply chronic worriers who mistake perception for fact and see the world through a jaundiced eye? The Global Peace Index (or GPI) would beg to differ. According to the GPI, even if a few places have improved while others have worsened, the world has become consistently less peaceful over the course of the past six years, at a time when worldwide political, diplomatic, military and business leaders really need to be achieving an awareness of the fact that the survival of the human species literally depends on world peace and cooperation.

Developed by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), the Global Peace Index has been conceived as an objective measuring device for worldwide peace and social justice. Chaired by entrepreneur Steve Killelea, the IEP is headquartered in Sydney, Australia, and also has branch offices in New York City and in Oxford, England. The IEP is a non-profit organization whose objective is to study the links between business, peace and economic development and to widely publicize its research and findings. It operates on the premise that peace is a crucial pre-requisite for the survival of humanity. Based on its studies, the IEP’s extended mission is to create and disseminate educational materials for the promotion of world peace.

The GPI, for its part, is widely considered to be a benchmark study for measuring world peace. It is an annual report presented at special events in London, Washington DC and at the United Nations. Data for the GPI report is collected and compiled by the renowned Economist Intelligence Unit (EUI), which is the international research and intelligence division of the Economist Group (publishers of major business publications including The Economist magazine). The index is endorsed by such major world peace campaigners as the Dalai Lama, Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, world-renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs, Nobel Prize-winner Muhammad Yunus, former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and former US President Jimmy Carter, among others.

The annual study currently ranks 162 out of the world’s 196 countries (with more nations being added each year and with the total this year up from just 121 in 2007). The main thrust of the study gauges global peace within the context of three main headings:  the level of safety and security within society; the extent of involvement in domestic or international conflicts; and the overall degree of militarization seen in each country.

That said, however, the annual study weighs over a score of factors including data on domestic crime and violence and on external impacts such as foreign relations, military spending and involvement in warfare and arms trafficking. Ten of the indicators applied evaluate safety and security. Accordingly, low crime rates, minimal terrorist activity or violent demonstrations, good relations with neighboring countries, a stable political scene, and a lack of displaced people or refugees are all equated with a peaceful society. But seven other factors also affect countries’ peace score, including military build-up, access to weapons and level of militarization, as well as other indicators such as a country’s access to nuclear or other heavy weaponry and the ratio of military expenditure to GDP.

So it is, for instance, that the United States, despite coming up a couple of notches this year, thanks to a reduction in military spending under the Obama administration, still ranked way down on the peace index at 101^st place—between Benin and Angola—out of the 162 nations studied.

In key findings, the 2014 report concludes that the three most peaceful countries in the world are Iceland, Denmark and Austria, while the least peaceful are currently South Sudan, Afghanistan and Syria in that descending order. Affecting the continuing seven-year trend toward an ever less peaceful world were the ongoing war in Syria, the civil war being fought in South Sudan, increasing terrorism in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and the Philippines and growing tension between pro-Russian separatist rebels and the Ukraine government. Europe remains, overall, the most peaceful region on earth. And although southern Asia’s peace ratios improved slightly this year, it was still the world’s least peaceful region. The report’s risk assessment section concludes from current objective data that countries that can expect to see deteriorating levels of peace over the next two years include Zambia, Haiti, Argentina, Chad, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Nepal, Burundi, Georgia, Liberia and Qatar.

There are some nations that weigh in as somewhat more peaceful than others thanks to “negative peace” factors, such as not being involved in conflicts or not being at immediate risk of becoming involved in any, but without the country in question having focused on any sort of peace-building effort. This is where the GPI weights the study to also recognize the concept of “positive peace”.

A number of other studies have attempted to explore the idea of “positive peace”, but in most cases their posits have tended to include peace factors that are more presumed than measurable—human rights, participative democracy, gender equality, social tolerance, open communication, etc.—thus rendering them largely subjective. Bearing this in mind, the GPI report has compiled data from reliable peace research sources that use more measurable indices of such assets as democracy, transparency, education and material well-being for weighing countries’ contributions to “positive peace”. In all such cases, what the GPI study attempts to do is gauge the drivers behind the creation and building of peaceful societies from both a domestic and external standpoint

This has a lot to do with why, for instance, the United States’ northern neighbor, Canada, ranks 7^th among the world’s most peaceful nations, compared with the 101^st slot that the US holds. And it is largely thanks to Canada’s stunning score that the North American region is considered the second most peaceful combined region of the world after Western Europe.

Along these lines of clear objective measurement, the GPI also quantifies the cost of violence to the world economy (and therefore to addressing enormous unfulfilled human and environmental needs). In its latest GPI report, the IEP concludes that the global economic impact of worldwide violence factors out to US$ 9.8 trillion. This is an amount equal to 11.3 percent of the gross world product (or in other words, more that 11 percent of the wealth the world produces is squandered on violence).

But let’s make this figure clearer still in social and human terms: If we can believe the United Nations estimates regarding how much money it would take to feed the over 900 million men, women and children who, at present, are chronically undernourished, the enormous current cost of global violence would be enough to amply feed the world’s hungry for the next 220 years, to say nothing of the gargantuan impact such an enormous amount of money could have on worldwide medical care, education, social and economic development and the creation of alternative energies to start reverting the environmental havoc that we are wreaking on the planet and which, if we continue to do nothing, with eventually spell our collective demise.

Perhaps it’s time to ask ourselves if these facts alone don’t constitute sufficient incentive for people everywhere to demand that their political leaders foster an end to war and start effectively working toward  building positive, collaborative and enduring world peace.