America and China More Peaceful than India

As per regions, Asia Pacific has an overall score improved by the largest extent from last year and included three of the top five risers. Sub-Saharan Africa is not the least peaceful region for the first time and has steadily increased levels of peacefulness since 2007. Middle East and North Africa were noted to be the least peaceful region, reflecting the upheaval and instability caused by the Arab Spring.

Western Europe remains noticeably the most peaceful region with the majority of its countries in the top 20 for the sixth consecutive year. North America showed a slight improvement, continuing a trend since 2007. While Latin America experienced overall gain with 16 of the 23 countries seeing improvements to their GPI score. All regions excluding the Middle East and North Africa saw an improvement in levels of overall peacefulness.

The top 5 fallers were noted to be Syria, Egypt, Tunisia, Oman and Malawi. Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe, Bhutan, Guyana and the Philippines were the top 5 risers on the Global Peace index list.

There has been a change for the indicators as well. The top three largest improvements were noted for the political terror scale, terrorist acts and military expenditure as a percent of GDP. Improvements were seen in the military sphere, including a decline in military expenditure as a percentage of GDP in 2011, as many countries hit by economic headwinds moved to reduce budget deficits. Six of the world’s top military spenders: Brazil, France, Germany, India, the UK and the U.S., cut their defence budgets in 2011.