Vision of Humanity measures various peace indexes across the globe, from looking at specific countries and their states to the whole world.
It’s one of the most comprehensive Global Peace Indexes around and, now in its 10th year, has seen a historical decline in world peace in the last decade.
Here are four key findings from this year, according to information on their website:
- The decade long decline in peace. The last decade has seen a historic decline in world peace – this interrupts the long term improvements in peace since World War II.
- Terrorism at an all time high. The terrorism impact indicator had the greatest overall deterioration, with all but two regions recording an increase over the past decade.
- Battle deaths from conflict are at a 25 year high.The total number of conflicts has jumped sharply in recent years, rising from 31 in 2010 to 40 in 2014.
- The number of refugees and internally displaced persons increased dramatically over the decade, doubling from 2007 to 2015, to approximately 60 million people.
Vision for Humanity also noted that countries and global institutions are more bent on spending money to create and contain violence, but are doing very little work on peace.
They suggest that “the key to reversing the decline in peace is through building Positive Peace – a holistic framework of the key attitudes, institutions and structures which build peace in the long term.”
Iceland comes out as the most peaceful country, followed by Denmark, Austria, New Zealand, and Portugal. The least peaceful countries are Syria, South Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia.
Here’s what the world is currently looking like, with green being the most peaceful.
And South Africa? We rank 126/163:
The Vision of Humanity put together a video explaining the various factors that affect the global peace index:
[source:visionofhumanity]
