Once again an independent body has published a list comparing 163 countries in terms of “global peace”, taking into account some 23 factors. About half the countries improved this year (84) and about half (79) had lower scores. The average global score has deteriorated for nine consecutive years. Iceland has led the list since 2008. Canada came 11th, Australia 22nd, the United Kingdom 37th, America 131st.
I thought some of the countries that scored higher than the US were surprising. But the score includes nuclear weaponry, jailed population, rates of violence and political violence, militarization and perceptions and the US scored highly in these categories.
I’m not sure how useful these lists are. But I invite any comments or thoughts you might have.
ISTM there’s a tremendous difference between externally peaceful versus internally peaceful. There are some correlations, but they’re really independent, although not orthogonal, axes.
So the Post’s headline about “safest” is misleading.
It’s easy to be internally peaceful if your country is moderately prosperous with no significant racial or religious minorities and a non-extreme amount of economic inequality. Surprise surprise!
It’s easy to be externally peaceful if you’re a small country with relatively small international involvement and you have the excellent luck to be surrounded by similar countries.
I suppose I’d be more interested in an “a**hole country” ranking which adjusted for the factors I mentioned so we could identify who’s more or less a problem disproportionate to their natural circumstances. I suspect most of us could come up with a pretty consistent top 10 list for that. 'Murrica! F*** yeah!
I’d also be interested to learn about the happy end of the “a**hole country” ranking. Those are the folks who’re outperforming the geo-political and societal hand they’ve been dealt. Getting more countries to emulate them would improve the world. And there are probably some pretty interesting and quite different examples among those countries. Suggesting there’s more than one way to be good, or at least to be better.
I am shocked to not see Liechtenstein on that list. Is that a violent country (I guess it is a principality but I never really understood the distinction)?
I will say most on the list are small countries (small population). Also, very homogenous countries.
Kia ora from (temporarily) New Zealand! Not sure where your threshold is for “significance” of a “racial or religious minority”, but AFAICT the NZ population is about 17% Maori, 15% Asian, and 8% Pasifika.
New Zealanders apparently self-identify as about 49% no religion and 37% Christian, with the remaining 14% or so being other religions or undeclared.
Meh, maybe if you’re trying to suss out what makes the top ten the top ten. But going even a little way further down the list introduces much more variation in size and/or homogeneity, including Germany at #15 and Malaysia (pop. > 34 million, 64% Muslim, 18% Buddhist, 9% Christian) at #19. Hungary and Australia also outrank smaller prosperous Norway at #24.