How do you measure world peace?

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I'm Emma, I'm sam.

Global levels of peace deteriorated at historic rates over the past year, according to new data from the Institute for Economics and Peace. The independent think tank compared levels of peacefulness across one hundred and sixty three countries for its annual Global Peace Index, and it found global conflicts have reached their highest rate since World War Two.

But how do you actually define peace and how is it measured? Well? To understand more about the latest Global Peace Index, you're going to hear from Michael Collins. He's the executive director Americas of the Institute for Economics and Peace. He's going to join Emma in today's But first, m what is making headlines.

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Ah Sam.

We were on a roll there and you had to go and take it to that place. Global conflicts, increased military spending, and broader economic pressures are some of the reasons behind a decline in overall levels of peacefulness across the world. That's according to the Global Peace Index. Now since two thousand and eight, this index has been using a range of indicators to analyze the country's involvement in

Thank you very much for having Meeama.

We're talking today about the Global Peace Index. First of all, I wanted to understand what is the index.

So the Global Peace Index is essentially a method or a tool to be able to measure changes in peacefulness globally. So peace for the most part, at least historically, has been sort of thought about, something fuzzy around the edges. Everyone has their own definition of peacefulness. So it's very much an aim to be able to sort of provide a bit of a data driven perspective as it pertains to peace and changes in peacefulness around the world.

So how do you define peacefulness?

So one of the easiest places to start, or at least where we chose to start with this is measuring in this instance the opposites, and we start by measuring this absence of violence or fear of violence.

So we take things like homicide measures, for example.

Numbers of violent demonstrations, the amount of conflict in countries, the levels of incarceration, and then we bring all of those different metrics together. The premise of this is the most peaceful countries are the ones that have the lowest measures in all of those different indicators as well.

So essentially the lower the score, the more peaceful the place.

That's absolutely right.

So to make all of this different data comparable, what we do is we do go through this process of banding scores everything from one to a five. It's a bit of a convoluted and complex process, but it really helps kind of simplify what are a lot of complex sort of dynamics and indicators.

In a nutshell.

Yes, if you're living in a five, things aren't so great.

Right now, we're talking today, specifically about the latest findings, the twenty twenty four Index out this week. Can you talk me through some of the key insights from this year's report.

Yeah, absolutely.

First off is that peacefulness is deteriorating in particular conflict measures, and we're still those conflict measures, you know, or those conflicts are essentially becoming more and more difficult to resolve over time. So you know, we're looking at the largest number of conflicts that we have seen since the end of World War II, essentially, so fifty six conflicts around

We see that a lot more countries are more.

Readily getting involved in other countries conflict, whether that be in direct support of the government in that country or alternatively armed groups within that country as well, and that's creating quite a mess. So if we look back in the days of when there was you know, essentially one superpower, when the world was a lot more unique polar we could see that in terms of conflicts, a lot more conflicts were resolved, a lot more conflicts were resolved bilaterally.

That figure you mentioned, the highest number of countries engaged in conflict since World War Two is pretty staggering. How significant is the scale of that number of conflicts and why now?

So again, I mean, I think that this is all progressive. To put things in contexts slightly. I mean, we are talking in terms of overall battle deaths and numbers that are a lot lower than what we would have seen in a Cold War, for example. So in terms of overall battle deaths, that said, we've seen an increase in that in the last two or three years.

So since the inception of the Global Piece Index.

We're sure that the record in battle deest this was back in twenty twenty two, twenty twenty three was close to this mark. Fifty thousand people have died in the first four months of this year, so we're perhaps going to hit a new sort of record for the Global Peace Index, but going back in time, we're still lower on those overall numbers.

But again, this.

Really speaks to this broader set of conflicts that there was a whole likelihood now that any one of those individual conflicts which yesterday was a minor conflict. We think about Ethiopia, we think about Ukraine, if we think about Gaza, those are all minor conflicts back in twenty nineteen, and look where we are today.

Do you expect to see that trend of what were previously minor conflicts becoming major ones? Do you expect to see that trend continuing intensifying into more record breaking numbers next year?

Yes.

I mean it's always a difficult prediction to make, but in terms of the law of large numbers and what we're seeing in terms of trends, that is definitely what we would expect that out of some of those smaller conflicts, we would see more major conflicts arise. Unless anything radically changes on the world stage, I really don't see that happening anytime soon. I think that there's going back to the UN again. There's a lot of stagnation. There is

Term there are, of.

Course dozens of global conflicts at play with the data this year, but I think it would probably be remiss of us not to dive a little deeper into Gaza, the conflict there. Of course, you've been tracking these findings over a period of years. How have you seen things change and shift given the intensification of that conflict.

I mean, definitely an intensification in terms of the terrorist attack, which was the largest terrorist attack worldwide since September eleventh, and then of course the Israeli response in Gaza with over thirty thousand Palestinians killed to date. So certainly a massive escalation in a very short period of time. But if you look at the overall tensions that have been

Although it's always.

A shock when we see this quick acceleration, the underlying fabric and the relations in these two countries have been deteriorating for quite some time already.

I'm interested in understanding the scope of military spending in contributing towards these results. How does military spending kind of stack up compared to peace building or peacekeeping spending internationally.

So militarization is something that we would track as a negative in this instance.

The exception to that would be precisely what.

You mentioned, Emma, which is peace keeping or peace building contributions primarily through UN frameworks which are more consensus based, basically as a proxy to a commitment to peace building. Now, whether that's done at the same time or not is the or question. And I think a lot of the increasing militarization that we're seeing over the recent three or four years is in response to specifically this large amount of conflict that we're now seeing around the world. So

One of the interesting findings to me was learning that the US has more significant military power than China. Did that come as a surprise to you and the team?

I don't think it came so much as a surprise to me.

I spent a lot of time living in the US, so I spent a lot of time hearing how great the American military is.

Makes sense for context for us here at home. Asia.

Pacific tensions are you know, a big part of the new cycle, and that certainly dominates the dialogue here from a defense perspective, and a lot of foreign spending and military spending tends to be built on a sort of rhetoric about the imposing fear and growth and power of China.

And again that is totally understandable, Yes, and I think Americans would be relieved to see that they have still three times the capability at least along those lines than China would have. But one of the interesting things I should say is actually the significant increase in military capacity that China has had over the last five years. So although it's still well below the United States, it's growing in capacity very very quickly.

Indeed, I want to talk to you about some of the more hopeful findings from the index. Who or where was the most peaceful country in twenty twenty three.

So the most peaceful country in twenty twenty three. Last twenty twenty four was Iceland. Iceland has been the most peaceful country since the inception of the Global Peace Index.

In fact, it's so far ahead that it would take quite a bit of deterioration for that to actually swap.

As far as we can see, there's not any magical transformative power of being in Iceland. It's just an accumulation of circumstances. In fact, Iceland did deteriorate and peacefulness this year, including increase in violent demonstrations for example.

And there are a lot of.

Other peaceful countries around the world, so Ireland, Austria, New Zealand, Singapore, Switzerland. Australia does relatively well as well. Unfortunately, the United States does quite poorly currently run T one hundred and thirty second, so.

Not great there.

But one of the most interesting things that the Global Peace Index allows us to do is to set that sort of benchmark for peacefulness. So this forms the basis of our positive peace work, which is essentially a statistical analysis to be able to ascertain what are the socioeconomic and attitudinal factors that create a sustained peace.

So what is Iceland getting right?

I feel like countries like Iceland pop up all the time in these global studies.

What are the Icelandics doing that We're not?

Well?

As I mentioned, New Zealand is pretty up there, as is Australia. Hanna did us pretty well too, and most of the European countries are quite peaceful too. Surprisingly, one of the things that I have noted in this particular index is that some of the Scandinavian countries have dropped off a bit, so perhaps not as true.

As it once was.

I mean, if we think back using the same metrics, Europe would be one of the least peaceful countries if we looked at it back in the days of World War II, for example.

Right.

Rather than concentrating on Iceland specifically, I'd love to be able to broaden it out to what we see helps create sustained peaceful countries over sort of five hundred socio economic indicators that we see share a strong statistical correlation. As these improve, we see that peacefulness improves on the other end, And there's a whole bunch of stuff, so you can't really single out an individual one, but we can broadly throw them into eight buckets.

Right. These are what we call the eight pillars of.

Positive peace, essentially the characteristics of peaceful societies. This includes a well functioning government, equitable distribution of resources, free flow of information, good relations with neighbors, high loves of human capital, acceptance to the rights of others, low levels of corruption, and a sound business environment.

So given that, what does Australia need to do to improve its peacefulness?

We definitely offer something like the Positive Peace Framework as a tool for individual countries, societies, communities, neighborhoods and even organizations to be able to assess where they fall on the peace diagram and to score themselves around these particular pillars. And the reason that we often don't participate in direct policy recommendations is precisely because of a lot of this positive peace building is contextual in nature, so a lot

The eight Pillars of Positive Fears. So what do you think Australia should do.

Now that you have presented the pillars? Michael, I'm wondering if climate change is disrupting peacefulness perhaps in a country like Australia, where our natural landscape seems to bring so much pride and joy to a lot.

Of people's life. I wonder if that has a role to play.

It does in the sense that that is something that we can very much validate through our work. So parallel to the Global Peace Index. For the last five years now, we've been producing a report called Ecological Threat Report.

Now it doesn't look at climate change uniquely.

What it does is it looks at levels of food and security, water stress, natural disasters, and rapid population growth, all of these things other than rapid population growth and perhaps quakes, of things that could be and are aggravated by climate change. The reason I'm bringing that up is because we do see a very close correlation between ecological degradation and deteriorations in peacefulness as well.

I do wonder given that we're in the midst of an historic election year global elections around the country, hundreds of millions of people casting votes across the year, if that will play a role in negatively or positively affecting peacefulness.

It's a very good question for us.

It fundamentally comes down to what are the underlying resilience measures underpinning that. We often talk about tipping points, right, if we see that there is a country the lower levels of resilience that may be scraping by and an election or the result from an election maybe lights the spark of revolt. As you know, this year, most of the world is going to the elections, so building on the fact that we're seeing this increasing amount of conflict, we definitely see additional risk there.

Michael, thank you so much for joining us on the days and thank you for your time.

Thanks so much for joining us on the Daily Ohs this morning. I really enjoyed that episode. Thank you m for that interview. If you learn something from today's episode, don't forget to hit subscribe. So there's a tdy eight episode waiting for you every weekday morning. We'll be back again tomorrow for your Friday episode. Until then, have a great Thursday. My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a