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Each year it produces a Global Peace Index to determine whether the world is getting more or less peaceful.
The latest analysis, released a few days before the Trump-Kim meeting, found the level of peace deteriorated in 92 countries during 2017 while improving in 71. That’s the worst result in four years.
Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Iraq and Somalia were the least peaceful countries last year. Iceland, New Zealand, Austria, Portugal and Denmark were the most peaceful.
North Korea was ranked a lowly 150 out of 163 nations (a position determined prior to the Singapore summit).
But the index’s founder, businessman and philanthropist Steve Killelea, says that even if the Korean peninsula becomes more serene in the wake of the agreement signed by Trump and Kim, it won’t make a huge difference to the state of global peace.
“We’d see North Korea get a reasonable bounce in peacefulness plus a slight bounce in South Korea, Japan and maybe a couple of others but it would not be enough to radically change the overall index which takes into account peacefulness across 163 countries,” he said.
In other words, if North Korea is denuclearised there’ll still plenty of conflicts to resolve.
The index, which covers more than 99 per cent of the world’s population, measures peacefulness using three broad categories: the level of societal safety and security (such as terrorism and violent crime), ongoing domestic and international conflict (including deaths due to combat), and the degree of militarisation (including military spending and arms transfers).
All three domains deteriorated over the past year.
Worse still, the index shows the world is less peaceful now than at any time in the past decade – the average country score has deteriorated by 2.38 per cent in that period.
But the decline has not been uniform. The gap between the peace haves and have-nots is growing.
Since 2008 index scores of the 25 least peaceful countries have declined on average by 12.7 per cent while the 25 most peaceful countries improved by 0.9 per cent on average over the same period.
“It is much harder to build peace than it is to destroy it,” says Killelea.
The global trend in battlefield deaths is also disturbing – according to the index that count has risen by 264 per cent in the past decade largely due to long-running conflicts such as Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Afghanistan.
But the single data point showing the largest deterioration since 2008 is the impact of terrorism, with 62 per cent of countries recording some increase in terrorist activity and 35 per cent experiencing a large deterioration.
The displacement of people is another major drag on peace – refugees made up almost 1 per cent of the global population in 2017 for the first time in modern history, a rate 12 times higher than that in 1951.
The index draws attention to the immense economic cost of conflict.
It estimates the global economic impact of violence was $US14.76 trillion in 2017 (in terms of purchasing power parity), equivalent to 12.4 per cent of global GDP, or $US1988 per person.
The economic impact of violence increased by 2 per cent during 2017 with spending on internal security a key driver. The largest increases in security spending were in China, Russia and South Africa.
Even Australia has gone backwards – it had the second largest deterioration on the index’s measure of peacefulness in the Asia-Pacific region last year due to higher levels of incarceration and increased military spending. Although Australia does fairly well overall – we were ranked the world’s 13th most peaceful nation.
There are some intriguing results on the index’s peacefulness league table. Norway and Sweden, two Scandinavian nations with progressive reputations, score fairly poorly for militarisation because they are among the largest weapons exporters when measured as a percentage of GDP. The US wallowed at number 121 in the rankings, lower than Papua New Guinea and one place above Myanmar.
There is a strong correlation between economics and peace. The index has found inflation rates in nations with a low level of peace are nearly three times higher than in very peaceful nations while foreign direct investment in is nearly half.
But according to researchers Valerie Hudson, Bonnie Ballif-Spanvill, Mary Caprioli, and Chad Emmett there is one factor that predicts the state of peacefulness like no other: sex.
Their 2012 book Sex and World Peace harnessed an immense amount of data to explore the links between gender and state security.
It showed the larger the gender gap between the treatment of men and women in a society the more likely a country was to be involved in intra-state and interstate conflict.
“We found that there is a strong and highly significant link between state security and women’s security,” Professor Hudson wrote in Foreign Policy.
“In fact, the very best predictor of a state’s peacefulness is not its level of wealth, its level of democracy, or its ethno-religious identity; the best predictor of a state’s peacefulness is how well its women are treated.”
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