全球和平指数Global Peace Index

Peace is the most fundamental public good of human civilization. Johan Galtung distinguished "negative peace" (the absence of violence) from "positive peace" (the elimination of structural violence and injustice); Kant, in Perpetual Peace, regarded "republican constitution, international law, and cosmopolitan law" as the institutional ladder toward perpetual peace; and the Charter of the United Nations, with the purpose of "saving succeeding generations from the scourge of war," created the mechanisms of collective security and peacekeeping.

Existing peace evaluation systems (such as the Global Peace Index, GPI, of the Institute for Economics & Peace, IEP) mostly focus on the negative-peace dimension of "the absence of violence." Building on that, and following the CPPPS proprietary evaluation algorithm norms, this index constructs a four-dimensional peace model of "Scale + Quality + Innovation + Contribution" to evaluate 33 major economies worldwide: the "Quality" dimension measures domestic peace and demilitarization (low crime, low conflict, low military spending); the "Innovation" dimension measures peace diplomacy (treaty participation, mediation, and diplomatic networks); and the "Contribution" dimension measures global peacekeeping and peace contributions (peacekeepers, peacekeeping funding, and foreign aid). This is the distinctive feature of this index—it incorporates and positively evaluates the responsibility of countries that "contribute money, troops, and solutions" for global peace.

The evaluation results show that Norway, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, and Canada rank in the top five. Overall, neutral and high-welfare countries with highly stable societies, extremely low crime rates, and low militarization lead the list; countries mired in war or with high violence (South Africa, Israel, Ukraine) rank at the bottom. This ranking is computed from underlying public data and does not directly reproduce IEP rankings; all data are approximate values from publicly available common knowledge, marked "subject to official figures," permanently free and public, for research and reference only.

The peace index is composed of a four-dimensional nonlinear structure, in which "Quality (domestic peace)" is a seven-factor geometric mean reflecting the "barrel effect"—any violence-related shortcoming (high murder rate, high conflict, high military spending) will significantly drag down the whole:

In the formula above, items marked with a prime (′) are values after range standardization to [0,1] (negative indicators have been inverted), and each factor is floored at 0.05 to prevent a single zero item from collapsing the whole. Large-span scale indicators (economic size, absolute military spending, peacekeepers, and foreign aid) are log-transformed before standardization to prevent top countries from monopolizing the score.

The weighting logic is as follows: "Quality (domestic peace)" is the hard core of peace, accounting for 65% and playing a dominant role; "Contribution (global peacekeeping)" reflects the responsibility of "contributing money, troops, and solutions" for world peace, accounting for 18% and serving as the distinctive feature of this index; "Innovation (peace diplomacy)" accounts for 12%; and "Scale (economic size)," as the resource base of peace and a country's voice in global governance, accounts for only 5% (a large economy does not equal more peace, hence the lowest weight).

The murder rate uses approximate values from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC); the incarceration rate references the World Prison Brief; military spending uses approximate values from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) military expenditure database; political stability references the World Bank's Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI); economic size references the IMF/World Bank; peacekeepers and funding reference public data from UN Peacekeeping Operations (UN PKO); and foreign aid references public materials from the OECD DAC and South-South cooperation. All the above data are approximate values from publicly available common knowledge, marked "subject to official figures."

Limitations of this model: ① some indicators (mediation, involvement in external conflicts, internal conflict) are approximate subjective quantifications and contain errors; ② the "Contribution" dimension is measured by scale (personnel, funding, aid amounts) without distinguishing the "quality" and "effectiveness" of the contribution; ③ the impact on peace of new security threats such as climate change and public health is not included. The ranking is for research and reference only and does not constitute any policy advice.