The Global Peace Index is an annual ranking of 163 countries and territories, scored on a scale that measures everything from military spending and weapons imports to homicide rates and political instability. Published each year since 2007 by the Institute for Economics and Peace, a Sydney-based think tank, it remains the most widely cited attempt to put a number on how peaceful the world actually is. The picture it paints is not encouraging: between 2008 and 2023, the global average score worsened by about five percent, and the gap between the most and least peaceful nations has grown steadily wider.
What the Index Actually Measures
The GPI evaluates peacefulness across three broad domains. The first, Ongoing Conflict, captures active warfare, casualties from internal and external conflicts, and the intensity of organized internal conflict. The second, Societal Safety and Security, looks at factors like the homicide rate, incarceration rates, the likelihood of violent demonstrations, and perceptions of criminality. The third, Militarisation, tracks military expenditure as a share of GDP, armed services personnel per capita, weapons imports and exports, and nuclear and heavy weapons capability. Altogether, 23 individual indicators feed into the composite score.
Each country receives a score between 1 and 5 on each indicator, with 1 being the most peaceful. Those indicator scores are then weighted and combined into an overall number. Countries near the top of the list, like Iceland and New Zealand, tend to cluster around scores in the low 1s. Countries at the bottom, such as those mired in prolonged civil war, score well above 3. The weighting gives somewhat more influence to the Ongoing Conflict and Societal Safety and Security domains than to Militarisation, reflecting a judgment by the index’s architects that active violence and its direct social effects matter more to day-to-day peacefulness than the size of a country’s arsenal.
The data feeding into these indicators come from a mix of sources, including United Nations agencies, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, national government statistics, the World Bank, and expert panels assembled by the Economist Intelligence Unit. Some indicators, like military spending, are drawn from hard data. Others, like the perceived level of criminality in society, rely on qualitative assessments by country analysts. That blend of hard numbers and subjective judgment is both one of the index’s strengths and a recurring source of criticism.
A Fifteen-Year Slide
The world has become measurably less peaceful since the GPI began tracking it. From 2008 to 2023, the global average score deteriorated by 5.04 percent, shifting from 1.971 to 2.071. That may sound modest in raw numbers, but on the GPI’s tight scale it represents a meaningful and sustained slide, not a single bad year dragging down the average.1International Journal of Peace, Religion and Development Studies. Global Peace in Retreat? Trends, Drivers, and Divergence in the Global Peace Index, 2008–2023
The three domains did not deteriorate equally. Ongoing Conflict accounted for the steepest proportional decline, worsening by 14.0 percent over the period. Societal Safety and Security followed at 5.4 percent. The one bright spot was Militarisation, which actually improved by 6.2 percent, likely reflecting post-Cold War drawdowns in some regions and declining conscription in others.2International Journal of Peace, Religion and Development Studies. Global Peace in Retreat? Trends, Drivers, and Divergence in the Global Peace Index, 2008–2023 The takeaway is straightforward: while many countries have been trimming their armed forces and military budgets in relative terms, the conflicts that do exist have grown more intense and more deadly.
This trend has real implications for international development. By 2018, the GPI had declined for four consecutive years. That stretch of deterioration coincided with the early, formative period of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, which explicitly name peace, stability, human rights, and effective governance as essential conditions for sustainable development.3PubMed Central. War and peace: Is our world serious about achieving Sustainable Development Goals by 2030? A world growing less peaceful during the exact window in which global cooperation was supposed to be deepening makes the 2030 targets considerably harder to reach.
The Growing Divide Between Peaceful and Fragile States
It is not just that the average has worsened. The spread between the most and least peaceful countries has widened dramatically. Between 2008 and 2023, the cross-national standard deviation of GPI scores grew from 0.402 to 0.487. To put that in concrete terms, the score gap between the 25 most peaceful countries and the 25 least peaceful countries expanded from 1.238 to 1.528.4International Journal of Peace, Religion and Development Studies. Global Peace in Retreat? Trends, Drivers, and Divergence in the Global Peace Index, 2008–2023
What that means in practice is that the world is splitting into two tracks. The countries that were already peaceful have, by and large, stayed peaceful or even improved slightly. But the countries experiencing conflict, political instability, or social fragmentation have fallen further behind. The gap is not narrowing. This divergence matters because it suggests that the drivers of conflict in fragile states are not simply temporary disruptions that will correct themselves. They appear to be self-reinforcing, with conflict leading to institutional erosion, which in turn makes future conflict more likely.
For anyone using the GPI to track “world peace” as a single narrative, this divergence complicates the story. A global average can mask the reality that conditions are simultaneously improving in Scandinavia and collapsing in the Sahel. The index itself is more useful as a tool for identifying which countries are moving in which direction than as a thermometer for some unified concept of global peace.
Gender Equality as a Predictor of Peace
Among the many factors that researchers have tested against GPI scores, gender equality stands out as one of the most consistent predictors. A cross-country analysis of 115 nations found that the level of gender equality and social cohesion were the most robust and significant variables affecting the level of peace, even after controlling for other commonly cited determinants like GDP, democratic governance, and ethnic fragmentation.5Kadın/Woman 2000, Journal for Women’s Studies. Determinants of Global Peace and Gender Equality as an Invisible Hand: A Cross Country Analysis
The relationship runs deeper than simple correlation. Countries where women have greater access to education, political participation, and economic opportunity tend to rank higher on every domain of the GPI, not just societal safety. The researchers described gender equality as an “invisible hand” influencing peace, a phrase that captures how the effect operates through multiple channels simultaneously rather than through a single obvious pathway. It is not that countries with more women in parliament are less likely to start wars (though some research does suggest that). It is that the underlying social conditions that produce gender equality, such as strong institutions, lower tolerance for interpersonal violence, and more equitable distribution of resources, are the same conditions that produce peacefulness.
This finding carries practical weight. It implies that investments in girls’ education or women’s economic inclusion are not just development goals running parallel to peace, but may actually be upstream of it. A country working to improve its GPI score might get more traction from gender-equality reforms than from some conventional security measures.
The Environment-Conflict Feedback Loop
Environmental quality and peacefulness are deeply intertwined, and the relationship runs in both directions. A global analysis examining the GPI alongside the Positive Peace Index and the Environmental Performance Index found that conflict, environmental degradation, and economic hardship tend to feed into one another in a self-reinforcing cycle. Poorer countries are more likely to experience armed conflict, and countries in conflict face greater environmental stress, which in turn worsens economic conditions and raises the risk of future violence.6Earth System Governance. A global analysis of interactions between peace and environmental sustainability
The researchers concluded that environmental indicators are essential to measuring holistic peace, a point that the standard GPI largely overlooks. The index does not directly factor in deforestation rates, water scarcity, or air quality. Yet these conditions affect the societal stability that the GPI does try to capture. A country with collapsing fisheries and shrinking arable land faces pressures that can erode social cohesion and drive displacement, creating conditions ripe for the kinds of violence the GPI does measure. In that sense, the GPI may be catching the downstream effects of environmental problems without acknowledging the upstream causes.
Climate change is likely to intensify this feedback loop. Regions already scoring poorly on the GPI, particularly parts of sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East, also face some of the most severe projected climate impacts. Rising temperatures, more frequent droughts, and competition for water and farmland all act as threat multipliers for societies that already have limited institutional capacity to manage stress peacefully.
What the Index Leaves Out
The GPI has attracted substantial criticism for what it chooses to count and how it counts it. One pointed critique is that the index lacks a clear theoretical model for what peace actually is. Without a coherent theory behind the measurement, the selection and weighting of indicators risks being arbitrary. Critics have noted that the weights assigned to different indicators appear ad hoc and that the statistical techniques used to combine them into a single score are not always well justified.7Gandhi Marg. Constructing Indices of Peace: A Critical Reappraisal with particular Reference to Global Peace Index
A more fundamental objection is that the GPI carries an individualist bias, focusing heavily on direct physical violence and state-level military capacity while downplaying the structural and social relationships that shape whether a society is genuinely peaceful. A country could score reasonably well on the GPI while still having severe racial inequality, widespread gender-based violence confined to private settings, or deep structural poverty that shortens lives just as surely as armed conflict. The index captures a snapshot of overt violence and military posture but misses much of what determines whether people in a society can actually live freely and safely.8Gandhi Marg. Constructing Indices of Peace: A Critical Reappraisal with particular Reference to Global Peace Index
There are also questions about data availability and quality. Many of the countries that score worst on the GPI are also countries where reliable data is hardest to collect. Conflict zones often lack functioning statistical agencies, and the expert assessments that fill those gaps bring their own subjectivity. The index inevitably does a better job of precisely ranking countries where data is plentiful, like Western Europe, than of distinguishing between gradations of instability in regions where reporting is fragmented.
Negative Peace Versus the Bigger Picture
Much of the criticism above connects to a distinction in peace studies between “negative peace” and “positive peace.” The GPI, for all its comprehensiveness, is overwhelmingly a measure of negative peace: the absence of violence. It asks whether people are being killed, whether armies are large, whether crime is controlled. These are crucial questions, but they do not capture whether a society has built the conditions that sustain peace over the long term.
Positive peace, by contrast, refers to the presence of attitudes, institutions, and structures that create and sustain peaceful societies. It includes things like a well-functioning government, equitable distribution of resources, free flow of information, good relations with neighbors, high levels of human capital, and acceptance of the rights of others. The concept, originally articulated by peace researcher Johan Galtung, holds that a society can be free of armed conflict but still riven by what he called structural violence: the slow, massive suffering caused by economic and political structures of exploitation and repression.9The Encyclopedia of Peace Psychology. Peace, Positive and Negative
The Institute for Economics and Peace recognized this gap and developed a separate tool, the Positive Peace Index, which attempts to measure these deeper conditions. But the GPI itself remains rooted in the negative-peace framework. When news headlines announce that “the world has become less peaceful,” they are reporting on the GPI’s narrow definition, not on the full spectrum of what peace researchers consider meaningful.
This distinction matters practically. A government that improves its GPI score by increasing policing and incarceration may look more peaceful on paper while doing nothing to address the inequality, corruption, or social exclusion that generate violence in the first place. Conversely, a country investing heavily in education, healthcare, and inclusive governance may not see immediate GPI improvements but could be building the foundations for durable peace. The GPI is useful as a barometer of immediate conditions, but treating it as the final word on whether a society is “peaceful” misses most of what the word means.
How Countries and Researchers Actually Use the Index
Despite its limitations, the GPI has become a fixture in policy conversations. Governments, international organizations, and NGOs cite it when making the case for conflict-prevention funding or when benchmarking national security strategies. The World Bank and several UN agencies reference it in country assessments. For journalists, the annual release of the GPI provides a digestible narrative about the state of the world, even if the underlying methodology is more contested than the headlines suggest.
Researchers use the GPI differently. Rather than taking the composite score at face value, they tend to pull it apart, using the domain-level and indicator-level scores as variables in studies that explore what drives peace or conflict. The gender-equality study discussed earlier, for instance, used GPI scores as the outcome variable to test which social conditions predicted higher peacefulness. The environmental analysis did the same, linking GPI data with environmental performance indicators to identify feedback loops. In this way, the GPI functions less as a report card and more as a shared measurement framework that lets different research teams compare findings.
One underappreciated use is longitudinal tracking within a single country. Year-over-year changes in a country’s GPI score can signal emerging instability before it reaches crisis levels. A deterioration in the Societal Safety and Security domain, for example, might flag rising homicide rates or growing political unrest that has not yet made international news. Some conflict-prevention organizations monitor these shifts as early-warning indicators, giving the index a practical role that goes beyond the annual rankings.
Why Some Peaceful Countries Still Rank Poorly on Militarisation
One pattern that surprises people when they first explore the GPI is that some countries widely considered safe and stable do not score as well as expected, because their military spending or weapons exports drag down their composite score. The United States is the most conspicuous example: it ranks relatively well on some societal safety indicators but carries a heavy penalty in the Militarisation domain due to its defense budget, nuclear arsenal, and weapons exports. Several Gulf states show a similar pattern, scoring decently on domestic safety metrics while ranking poorly overall because of arms purchases and military personnel levels.
This is a feature of the index, not a bug, but it does create odd optics. A citizen of a country with a high military budget but low crime might look at the GPI ranking and feel it does not reflect their daily experience of safety. And they would be partly right: the GPI is measuring something broader than “how safe do I feel walking home at night.” It is trying to capture whether a country’s overall posture, including its capacity and apparent willingness to project military force, contributes to or detracts from global peacefulness. Whether that is a reasonable thing to include in a peace index depends on whether you think peace is purely about the absence of domestic violence or also about the likelihood that a country’s military capacity could be used abroad.
The improvement in the Militarisation domain over the past fifteen years suggests that many countries have been reducing their relative military footprint. But the simultaneous worsening of the Ongoing Conflict domain shows that the conflicts which do exist have become more intense and more destructive. Fewer guns in aggregate, but the ones being used are causing more harm. That tension captures something important about the current state of global peace: the infrastructure of violence may be shrinking in some dimensions while the actual practice of violence concentrates and intensifies in others.