Compiled by the Economist, the Global Peace Index ranks countries based on 24 indicators of what the panel considers as key contributions to a peaceful society and country as a whole. Canada ranks 11th, with Iceland topping the list, the US close to the 100th place and everyone else in between.
However a mere look at the ranking rings a few alarm bells, which the index's creators do acknowledge. Israel is rock bottom, while brutal regimes such as Uzbekistan, Zimbabwe, North Korea and Burma are higher. Dictatorial Belarus, meddling Syria and human-rights-abuser China are "more peaceful" than the United States. Something is wrong here, these countries in no way can qualify as peaceful nations (most of them) and certainly not as peaceful societies. What went wrong?
The number of police servicemen and jailed population proportion are given the same weighting as non-UN troop deployments, ease of access to weapons (assumingly including sales) and possibility of terrorist attack. Military sophistication is a handicap, as are UN deployments, army size and weapons trade transactions.
All this leaves the indicators of political stability, relationships with others, external and internal conflicts and human rights respect belittled compared to their actual true weight. Furthermore, the human rights indicator is fetched from Amnesty International's yearbook, which implies that being open to scrutiny is not a good thing (Zimbabwe has the same value as Israel on the human rights indicator). Other critics point to the GPI's ignorance of such factors as violence against women. David Suzuki would probably argue that adherence to Global Warming dogma should be included (but seriously, care for the environment is completely ignored).
Healthy free-market trading democracies rarely go to war with one another, a well-trained army and police force with sophisticated equipment can protect the peace of the country and the citizenry, while UN involvement denotes a commitment to international cooperation in hot spots. The GPI seems to promote the idea of a society that has a pre-historic army and police or none at all, does not participate in UN missions, sucks up to Amnesty International and is a general left-wing utopia where 100% of the population votes and is full of young people aged 15-35.
In its current form the Global Peace Index places excessive weight on factors which do not affect a country's peacefulness or functioning as a healthy society, but rather seems to promote a partisan view of how peace is to be achieved. I wouldn't expect anything different from an index endorsed by Jimmy Carter.
My verdict: good attempt. Now tinker with the weightings and factor in the many true indicators of peacefulness that have been missed.
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