A Global Geography of Peace (and Violence)

Ongoing conflict in the Middle East and mass killings here in the United States have made the world seem an increasingly violent place. That’s not necessarily true: Harvard’s Steven Pinker has shown that the arc of human progress has bent—in fits and starts—toward non-violence over time. But what of violence—and peace—over the past few years? A new report from the Institute for Economics and Peace finds that global levels of violence have ticked up modestly since 2008. According to the latest, 2015 edition of its Global Peace Index (or GPI), the average country has seen a 2.4 percent decline in peacefulness over the past eight years, though the level of violence around the world has remained relatively stable over the past two.

But the relative peacefulness or violence of nations varies widely across the world, as the map below from the report shows. It depicts the GPI scores for 162 nations, based on 23 qualitative and quantitative indicators of violence or fear of violence, including: deaths from external and internal conflicts; violent crime rates; levels of imprisonment; expenditures on police and security forces; military spending; arms sales; and statistics on refugees and displaced people, among others. The countries in red and orange are those in which levels of violence are high; countries in teal, by contrast, are relatively peaceful.