The United Nations (UN) member states have formally recognized the critical nature of peacefulness in advancing global development. The promotion of peace, justice and strong institutions has been included among the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which are a new set of goals to target poverty, inequality, injustice and climate change by 2030. Goal 16 relates specifically to the promotion of peace, justice and strong institutions.

The Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), dedicated to developing metrics to analyse peace and to quantify its economic benefits, has created the Global Peace Index (GPI) to measure the national peacefulness. The index gauges global peace using three broad themes: the level of safety and security in society, the extent of domestic and international conflict, and the degree of militarization. [1] These factors are both internal such as levels of violence and crime within the country and external such as military expenditure and wars. The GPI is composed of 23 qualitative and quantitative indicators from highly recognized sources, covering 99.7 per cent of the world's population, and it has been estimated since 2008.

The 2016 Global Peace Index report provides an statistical analysis of the state of peace in 163 countries outlining trends in peace and conflict, the economic cost of violence, and an assessment of the UN's Sustainable Development Goal 16. It shows that the world has became slyghtly less peaceful in the last years, and there is a growing global inequality in peace, with the most peaceful countries continuing to improve while the least peaceful are falling into greater violence and conflict.

The visualization shows the trends of number of countries by category of peace index over years from 2008 to 2016. Note that the number of countries in the most peaceful and peaceful categories remains constant, while the number of countries in least peaceful category (or countries with more violence and conflicts) is increasing. In the whole period, 10 countries from the Tension category moved to the Violence category.

People needs and deserved a more peaceful place to live. The human specie and society, and the economy that sustain our lives are in serious risk if we collectively don't take actions for a more peacefull, stable and prosperous world.

References

1. IEP (2016). GPI Methodology, 2016 Global Peace Index. Institute for Economics and Peace. pp: 95-107, 2015 Available online [pdf file] (accessed 3 Oct 2016)