Wednesday, June 08, 2016
Trillions
Spent on Violence as World Continues Downwards Spiral Away From Peace
Latest Global Peace Index shows that chipping
away at trillions spent on violence could render huge 'peace dividend'
The U.S. ranks at #103 on the latest Global
Peace Index. (Photo: Cleo Leng/flickr/cc)
The global spiral downwards towards less
peace continues, the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) finds.
The findings are laid out in the think tank's
latest Global Peace Index (GPI), now in its 10th edition, released Wednesday.
It ranks 163 states and territories based on 23 indicators covering domestic
and international conflict, societal safety and security, and a country's
militarization.
Book-ending the 2016 index (pdf) are Iceland, ranking as the
most peaceful country, and Syria, which ranks dead last. The United States
comes in at 103, just behind Uganda and Guinea, while the UK comes in much
further ahead at 47.
Putting a precise figure on the downward trend,
the authors of the new index say the world has become 2.44 percent less
peaceful since 2008. While 77 countries improved over the past decade, 85
countries fell.
Driving the decline is the impact of
terrorism and political instability. Deaths from terrorism shot up 80 percent,
while the number of countries suffering more than 500 deaths as a result of
terrorist acts jumped from 5 to 11. And only 23 percent of all the countries on
the index have been spared terrorist activity.
While the latest index shows that more
countries improved than deteriorated (81 to 79) compared to the prior index,
the level of deterioration outweighed the gains.
Europe is the most peaceful of the nine
geographical regions on the new index, with North America coming in as the
second. Not only did the Middle East and Africa (MENA) again rank last, it was
also the region with the biggest drop since the previous index. Three of the
five that fell compared to the prior year are also in that region: Yemen,
Libya, and Bahrain.
"As internal conflicts in MENA become
more entrenched," stated Steve Killelea, Founder and Executive Chairman of
the IEP, "external parties are increasingly becoming more involved and the
potential for indirect or 'war by proxy' between nation states is rising. This
was already evident in Syria with the conflict between the Assad regime and
multiple non-state actors, and is now spilling into countries such as Yemen.
There is a broader proxy conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and more
recently both U.S. and Russia have increased their level of involvement."
On top of that region's conflicts, the report
notes that the UN Refugee Agency described over 57 million people in 2015 as
refugees, internally-displaced people, or others of concern.
Among the highlights, as noted in the report:
·
Two indicators improved by more than ten percent, external
conflicts fought and UN peacekeeping funding.
·
The total number of deaths from terrorism rose from less than
10,000 in 2008 to over 30,000 in 2014.
·
Terrorism is at historical levels, battle deaths are at a
25-year high, and the number of refugees is at a level not seen in sixty years.
·
Internal peace and the societal safety and security domain
declined every year for the past eight years.
·
Nine countries have more than ten percent of their population
displaced in some form, with Somalia and South Sudan both having more than 20
percent and Syria over 60 percent.
Another finding, as noted by the Independent, is
that "only Botswana, Chile, Costa Rica, Japan, Mauritius, Panama, Qatar,
Switzerland, Uruguay and Vietnam are free from conflict."
There's another sobering point in the report:
while the ten-year trend downward has continued, there's been more spending on
violence than peace. The price tag on the violence added up to $13.6 trillion
in 2015, or 13.3 percent of gross world product. Investments in peacekeeping
and peacebuilding, in contrast, totaled $15 billion.
Even a meager improvement could bring about
big dollar value. Killelea notes that "peacebuilding and peacekeeping
spending remains proportionately small compared to the economic impact of
violence, representing just 2% of global losses from armed conflict. Addressing
the global disparity in peace and achieving an overall 10% decrease in the economic
impact of violence would produce a peace dividend of $1.36 trillion. This is
approximately equivalent to the size of world food exports."
Achieving sustainable peace is paramount, the
report notes, as "international cooperation on an unprecedented scale"
is needed to address the "unparalleled challenges" facing the world
including "climate change, decreasing biodiversity, increasing migration,
and over-population."
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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