World Peace Index: US Heading up Bottom Third

Based on twenty two criteria, the Institute for Economics and Peace, in its Global Peace Index, ranks the 162 nations of the world.

To calculate how peaceful a country is the GPI looks at 22 different indicators. Each of the different indicators is weighted according to importance and they can be broken down into three broad sections listed below with some examples:

Ongoing domestic and international conflict

• Number of external and internal conflicts fought
• Number of deaths from organised conflict
• Level of organised conflict

Societal safety and security

• Level of perceived criminality in society
• Political terror scale
• Number of homicides per 100,000 people
• Number of internal security officers and police per 100,000 people

Militarisation

• Nuclear and heavy weapons capability
• Ease of access to small arms and light weapons
• Volume of transfers of major conventional weapons as recipients (imports) per 100,000 people

This calculation is used to get an overall score with Iceland, the most peaceful country, getting 1.19 while Syria, the least peaceful, gets 3.65  The Guardian, UK

 

Here’s the world map, and ranking.  And the US peace ranking, also.

As you might intuit, the numbers have been rising (getting worse) of late.

World peace has deteriorated steadily over the last seven years, with wars, militant attacks and crime reversing six earlier decades of gradual improvement, a global security report said on Wednesday.

“There seem to be a range of causes,” Steve Killelea, founder and executive chairman of the IEP, told Reuters. “You have the repercussions of the “Arab Spring”, the rise of terrorism particularly following the invasion of Iraq and the repercussions of the global financial crisis.”

Haaretz