Green countries are the most peaceful |
With the crisis in Gaza, the rise of Islamist
militants in Iraq and Syria and the international stand-off ongoing in Ukraine,
it can sometimes feel like the whole world is at war.
But experts believe this is actually almost
universally the case, according to a think-tank which produces one of the
world’s leading measures of “global peacefulness” – and things are only going
to get worse.
The UK, as an example, is relatively free from
internal conflict, making it easy to fall to thinking it exists in a state of
peace. But recent involvement in foreign fighting in the likes of Afghanistan,
as well as a fairly high state of militarization, means Britain actually scores
quite poorly on the 2014 Global Peace Index, coming 47th overall.
Then there are countries which are involved in no
actual foreign wars involving deaths whatsoever - like North Korea – but which
are fraught by the most divisive and entrenched internal conflicts.
The IEP’s findings mean that choices are slim if you
want to live in a completely peaceful country.
The only ones to achieve the
lowest score for all forms of conflict were Switzerland, Japan, Qatar,
Mauritius, Uruguay, Chile, Botswana, Costa Rica, Vietnam, Panama and Brazil.
And even those countries are not entirely exempt
from other problems that, the IEP says, could lend to conflict further down the
line.
Switzerland is famously detached when it comes to
any external conflict, and has a very low risk of internal problems of any kind
– but loses a number of points on the overall index because of its
proportionately huge rate of arms exports per 100,000 of the population.
Analysts from the Economist Intelligence Unit must
be satisfied that it has “no conflict” within its borders. This rating on civil
unrest cannot even include “latent” conflict involving “positional differences
over definable values of national importance”.
The Global Peace Index measures the latest data up
to the end of the year before – meaning that the state of international
conflict right now is actually even worse than the study suggests. With the
protests over the World Cup still vivid in collective memory, for instance,
Brazil might find itself off the list of peaceful countries by 2015.
Speaking to The Independent, the director of the IEP
Camilla Schippa warned that the state of peace in our time has been “slowly but
steadily decreasing” in recent years.
“Major
economic and geopolitical shocks, such as the global financial crisis and the
Arab Spring, have left countries more at risk of falling into conflict,” Ms
Schippa said.
She added: “Continuing global unrest means that
there is unlikely to be a reversal of this trend in the short run.”
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