MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Chile and Uruguay most “peaceful” countries in region

Chile and Uruguay lead Latinamerican countries in the Global Peace Index, GPI, while Colombia and Venezuela figure as the most violent in the region according to the 2008 GPI released this week in London and which ranks 140 nations according to their relative states of peace.

Iraq ranks at the end of the 140 country list together with Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan and Israel while the most peaceful are Iceland, Denmark, Norway, New Zealand and Japan. The first Latinamerican country of the list is Chile, ranked 19; Uruguay 21; Argentina 56; Paraguay 70; Bolivia 78; Peru 80; Brazil 90; Mexico 93, with the United States figures 97. Venezuela stands in position 123 and Colombia is the region's most violent country, ranked 130 out of 140. Actually most Latinamerican countries range in the state of peace category "medium" and "low" with only four countries in the "high" and "very high" category, Chile, Uruguay, Costa Rica and Panama. Among highly developed countries Japan is ranked fifth; Canada 11; Germany 14; Italy 28; France 36 and UK 49. "The world seems slightly more peaceful this year", said Steve Killelea founder of the index. The index is composed of 24 qualitative and quantitative indicators from highly respected sources, which combine internal and external factors ranging from a nation's level of military expenditure to its relations with neighboring countries and the level of respect for human rights. These indicators were selected by an international panel of academics, business people, philanthropists and peace institutions. The GPI is collated and calculated by the Economist Intelligence Unit. GPI sponsors admit the concept of peace is notoriously difficult to define. The simplest way of approaching it is in terms of harmony achieved by the absence of war or conflict. Applied to nations, this would suggest that those not involved in violent conflicts with neighboring states or suffering internal wars would have achieved a state of peace. This is what Johan Galtung (Galtung, Johan. Peace by Peaceful Means: peace and conflict, development and civilization. Oslo: International Peace Research Institute, 1996) defined as a "negative peace" - an absence of violence. The concept of negative peace is immediately intuitive and empirically measurable, and can be used as a starting point to elaborate its counterpart concept, "positive peace": having established what constitutes an absence of violence, is it possible to identify which structures and institutions create and maintain peace? The GPI is a first step in this direction; a measurement of peace that seeks to determine what cultural attributes and institutions are associated with states of peace. The project has approached the task on two fronts - the first aim is to produce a scoring model and global peace index that ranks 140 nations by their relative states of peace using 24 indicators. The indicators have been selected as being the best available datasets that reflect the incidence or absence of peace, and contain both quantitative data and qualitative scores from a range of trusted sources. The second aim is to use the underlying data and results from the Global Peace Index to undertake investigations into the relative importance of a range of potential determinants or "drivers" that may influence the creation and nurturance of peaceful societies, both internally and externally.