The Peaceful Country in the World

Vision of Humanity groups together a number of interrelated initiatives focused on global peace. It brings a strategic approach to raising the world’s attention and awareness around the importance of peacefulness to humanity’s survival in the 21st century.

The Global Peace Index is a ground-breaking milestone in the study of peace. It is the first time that an Index has been created that ranks the nations of the world by their peacefulness and identifies some of the drivers of that peace.

The results of the GPI for 2009 suggest that the world has become slightly less peaceful in the past year, which appears to reflect the intensification of violent conflict in some countries and the effects of both the rapidly rising food and fuel prices early in 2008 and the dramatic global economic downturn in the final quarter of the year. Rapidly rising unemployment, pay freezes and falls in the valule of house prices, savings and pensions is causing popular resentment in many countries.

New Zealand is ranked as the country most at peace, followed by Denmark and Norway. Small, stable and democratic countries are consistently ranked highest; 14 of the top 20 countries are Western or Central European countries. All 5 Scandinavian countries are in the top ten of the GPI. For the third year running, the country ranked least at peace is Iraq. Afghanistan and Somalia follow – countries that are in a state of ongoing conflict and upheaval.

Malaysia is the 26th safest place in the world, the third highest Asian ranked country, up from 38th last year in the same index. I wonder……