Do you live in a peaceful place?

I live in Colombia, for a range of reasons, the most important of which is that my wife is Colombian. The change was big so I did some of my own research to prepare myself for the change. I still do keep my eyes open for information on my new home country, so was interested to come across a new annual study called The Global Peace Index. According to the State Of The World blog “The Global Peace Index … is an effort to depict peaceful societies in rank order from best to worst. The Index combines the factors identify a peaceful society (the ways in which we know it is peaceful or not), and the drivers that combine to create a peaceful society (the causes of it being peaceable or not), into a single index once-a-year portrait. It combines indicators of internal social peace with indicators about use of force in other countries. It distinguishes between force for intervention and the commitment of soldiers to UN Peacekeeping Operations. In the 2008 index, Iceland ranked 1st, Great Britain ranked 49th, and the USA ranked 97th out of 140 countries listed. Not surprisingly, the last five places were taken by (in order) Israel, Afghanistan,
Sudan, Somalia and Iraq.”

In 2008 Switzerland (where I came from) was ranked at 12/140. Colombia came in very low, at 130/140. Maybe my wife was right to warn me to be ready for The Change …

The full 2008 report (including reviews on a per country basis) plus a full colour map are available from Vision of Humanity