Global Peace Index: Georgia becoming a more peaceful nation

Georgia is becoming a more peaceful country while many other countries around the world are descending into chaos.

Georgia climbed 28 positions in global peace ratings and placed 111th out of 162 countries but it was still below the global average, according to the 2014 Global Peace Index (GPI) put together by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP). 

The world has generally become less peaceful each year since 2008, CPI said. The continued conflict in Syria, the deteriorating situation in Ukraine and the civil war in South Sudan contributed to the trend.  

Georgia gained more positive results in the report, which showed the country had made strong improvement in its external and internal peace scores. 

"In the former case, it was due to gradually improving relationships with its neighbours, including Russia, with which it still has not formalised diplomatic ties, but has seen some thawing of its existing animosity though a (limited) resumption of trade,” the report said. 

On the internal side, the report believed Georgia’s score was boosted by a reduction in prison population numbers as well as decreasing numbers of refugees and internally displaced persons, while its post-war stability was reflected in a reduction of its level of organised conflict and political instability in the Government’s second year in office.

To a lesser extent, Georgia also benefited from a fall in military expenditure. 

CPI said last year's fall in global peace was mostly attributed to drops in four of the 22 indicators used to put together the index. These were:

• Increased terrorist activity,
• Increased number of internal and external conflicts fought,
• Increased number of displaced people as a percentage of the population, and
• Increased number of deaths from organised internal conflict.

The top five most peaceful nations were completely unchanged from the 2013 study, with saw Iceland, Denmark, Austria, New Zealand and Switzerland named as the world’s top five peaceful countries.

Europe remained the most peaceful region as a whole and the United Kingdom ranked 47th, but in terms of individual countries, France ranked 48th and Turkey ranked 128th. 

GIP is the world’s leading measure of global peace. Now in its eighth year, the report is published annually by IEP and ranked nations according to their ‘absence of violence’.