An Interview with Daniel Hyslop, Research Manager at the Institute for Economics and Peace

The Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) looks specifically at how peace, business and prosperity are interlinked. What is the “economic value of peace” and why is it so important to look at the interconnection between economics and peace?

The IEP looks at the economic value of peacefulness because it generally is not a central part of economic policy to think about just how much violence costs the global economy. And our research shows that these economic costs are huge. We commissioned a study two years ago which found that violence costs the global economy approximately 9% of gross world product. So an enormous amount of economic activity gets lost in violence every year. What we want to demonstrate is that if businesses, governments, policy makers, and the general public understand and acknowledge the huge economic costs of violence there will be an investment in the kinds of policies that make the world more peaceful.

A core product of the IEP is the Global Peace Index (GPI). Now in its 6^th year, the GPI ranks 158 nations according to 23 indicators of peace. However, developing and applying these indicators seems to be quite a complex undertaking. Can you explain more about how the IEP goes about measuring ‘peacefulness’?

The GPI uses a ‘negative’ definition of peace - that is the absence of violence and the absence of the fear of violence. (Johan Galtung, the father of modern peace studies, first came up with this two-part definition of ‘negative peace’ and ‘positive peace’.) The GPI then attempts to capture ‘negative peace’ or the absence of violence with the help of 23 indicators which measure factors that are both internal and external to a nation-state. The index can be broken down into three major domains.

First, there is ‘measures of safety and security’. These are the things that tend to spring to mind when thinking of ‘peacefulness’: the level of homicides and violent crime in a society, the frequency of violent demonstrations, incarceration rates, etc.

Second, there is there is ‘ongoing domestic and international conflict’. Indicators in this domain – the number of battle deaths, the number of deaths from external or internal conflicts, etc. – investigate the extent to which countries are involved in outright conflict.

Finally, there are ‘measures of militarization’, which measures such things as military spending as a percentage of GDP, heavy weapons capability, and other contributors to a country’s military expansion.

By looking at as many indices of negative peace as we do, we create a composite measure that is both comprehensive and holistic. And yes, it is a complex undertaking. We work with the Economist Intelligence Unit which has over a hundred country analysts who help us fill the data gaps. At the same time, we try and fill more troublesome data gaps by making qualitative assessments. (This is one of the key contributions of the GPI as a survey.) The latter assessments are subsequently peer-reviewed by our Panel of Experts, who ultimately decides on the various weights assigned to GPI indicators. So, our work is ultimately an independent process: whilst the IEP sets the philosophical direction and oversees the GPI, it is also a product of the expert panel working in conjunction with the Economist Intelligence Unit.

Given all the indicators you use, what are some of the specific challenges you’ve faced when trying to measure ‘peacefulness’?

Well, there are, for example, challenges with trying to capture various dimensions of violence. For instance, there is no harmonized, consistent international dataset on domestic violence. We try and account for this through our Violent Crime Measure since, generally speaking, a lot of violent crime will be co-linear with domestic violence. But there are some country contexts where such approximations don’t apply. Thus, the index is by no means perfect but we also see it is a longer-term research project – i.e., once we get ten years of data, we hope we will be able to review all of the indicators. And as better data comes along, we can make use of it. For example, Last year, we shifted the GPI Terrorism Indicator, which used to reflect a qualitative anticipation of future terrorist acts, to a quantitative indicator based on the Global Terrorism Database, which is a very thorough and reputable data source.

So while we acknowledge that there are data gaps we are totally dedicated to filling these gaps as better data comes along.

What are in your opinion the most significant and most interesting or surprising trends captured in the last edition of the GPI?

The key finding of the 2012 GPI was that the world had become slightly more peaceful and that the aggregate level of peace (when you average it out across all countries) returned to approximately the same level as 2007. Basically, what we saw is that while ‘peacefulness’ was declining over the previous two years it has slightly improved now.

On a regional level, the most interesting fact was that Sub-Saharan Africa is no longer the least peaceful region in the world. It has now been replaced by the Middle East and North Africa, the only aggregate region which experienced a decline in ‘peacefulness’ last year. And interestingly enough, this decline is not just due to the impact of the Arab Spring, but also to Sub-Saharan Africa actually improving across a number of our indicators.

Finally, we saw changes in the indicators for ‘measures of militarization’. Many countries are cutting military spending and their military exports and imports are going down – which improves their scores on ‘measures of militarization’. This is a two-part story, however. On the negative side, austerity in a number of European countries saw cuts in social security and a corresponding increase in violent demonstrations and violent crime.

For additional information please see:
Global Peace Index 2012
Global Peace Index Interactive Map
Global Peace Index 2012 Factsheet