This is an excellent resource for A level students studying Global Development – and it also demonstrates the ‘macro approach’ to Sociology extremely well.

The Global Peace Index (GPI) ranks Independent countries by their ‘absence of violence’. The Index is composed of 23 indicators, ranging from such things as

• a nation’s level of military expenditure
• its relations with neighboring countries
• the level of respect for human rights.

The index uses the latest available figures from a wide range of respected sources, including The World Bank, various and UN offices and Peace Institutes and the Economist Intelligence Unit.

The project’s ambition is to go beyond a crude measure of wars—and systematically explore the texture of peace. The hope is that it will provide a quantitative measure of peacefulness, comparable over time, that will provide a greater understanding of the mechanisms that nurture and sustain peace. This, in turn will provide a new platform for further study and discussion, which will hopefully inspire and influence world leaders and governments to further action.

This Guardian article has a good summary of the data and this video below has more on the GPI

If you go straight to the bottom ranking countries you ge a real feel for the fact that while much conflict is found in the developing world, it is not limited to the poorest countries – suggesting there are complex and varied causes of conflicts the world over. The other thing that this analysis misses out on is the role of the west – need I remind of the US’s role in destabilising Iraq and Afghanistan? Anyway, the bottom ten or so are…we will be looking at some of these as case studies in the development module.  

• Nigeria
• Columbia
• North Korea
• The Democratic Republic of Congo
• Chad
• Georgia
• Russia
• Israel
• Pakistan
• Sudan
• Somalia
• Afghanistan
• Iraq