 Good afternoon. My name is Robert Lamb. I'm the director of the Program on Crisis, Conflict, and Cooperation here at CSIS. Thank you all for being here today, and welcome to those of you who are watching it live through the CSIS website and through the Hive. Welcome to all of you. CSIS, for a number of years, has been hosting the launch of the Global Peace Index on the Western Hemisphere. As many of you know, the Institute for Economics and Peace, which works pretty closely with the Economist Intelligence Unit, has been launching its Global Peace Index simultaneously in Washington and London every year, and it's been CSIS's pleasure to be the host of the Western Hemisphere launch. The role of a think tank such as CSIS has always been to connect the world of data and research to the world of policy, and CSIS has been doing that for 51 years now. And the Institute for Economics and Peace operates very firmly in the world of research and the world of data. And as you'll see, they have taken the best data that is available in the world today, and they've done a great deal of analysis, great deal of visualization to try to interpret what some of the big most important trends are regarding peace and violence and conflict in the world today. My program, the Program on Crisis, Conflict, and Cooperation, known as C3, has been studying the issues that IEP and the Global Peace Index deals with for the past 12 years. And I want to say just a quick word about translating scholarly research and data analysis into policy. Of course, one of the things that data and research can tell you are general trends, sometimes very specific trends about data. It can give you theories. It can give you patterns. But policymakers are responsible not for making policy on the general case or on broad trends. They're responsible for making policy in very specific places at very specific times. And so we'll see today a great deal of really excellent research showing the relationship between peace and conflict and peacefulness and a wide variety of patterns in the world. For example, institutional development countries with strong institutions tend to be more peaceful. But for the policymaker, what they don't know is a particular country they're working on, do you have to start with removing violence before you can build institutions? Can you start with building institutions to take care of violence? Is it possible to do both simultaneously to work on everything at once? Or do you need to find small areas where you can make incremental progress in some areas to win a little bit of space on violence to then win a little bit more freedom to improve institutional development and so on in a virtuous cycle? And that's where policy research comes in to try to interpret this. There are some countries that will improve on peace with less institutional development, some who have had a great deal of institutional development but less peace. But the general trend, the general pattern, is extremely important to observe that places that have strong institutions do generally tend to be more peaceful. It's up to all of us in the policy community to now take that information and that data and turn it into good policy. That's a great challenge, but it's one that we all relish. I would like to introduce Michelle Breslauer who is the head of the US programs for the Institute for Economics and Peace. She is going to present the basic results of the Global Peace Index and then we have a lot of great speakers who will go into greater detail of the findings and discuss their view and interpretation of what it all means. And I will introduce each speaker in turn. There are detailed biographies of everybody who's up here and I encourage you to look at them so that I don't have to go in great detail about their backgrounds. But it's my pleasure to introduce Michelle Breslauer. Thanks, Bob. And thanks to all the panelists, everybody who came out here today. I'm not gonna speak for too long because then I'm going to hand it over to my colleague, Daniel Hislip, who's gonna go into more detail about some of the analysis that we're doing, some of the work that Bob mentioned. I also wanna point out that Jamie Morgan is here from the Economist Intelligence Unit. They're one of our partners on the index and she's available to answer any questions that you guys might have in more detail about the methodology or the data. So the Institute for Economics and Peace produces the Global Peace Index and our mission is really to measure, identify the drivers and ascribe an economic value to peace. We wanna strip peace of its utopian connotations and we wanna make it a tangible measure of progress and well-being. So first it's important to understand how we define peace to do this. We look at a conceptual framework of negative and positive peace. Negative peace is the foundation of the Global Peace Index. The definition of the GPI is the absence of violence or absence of fear of violence and this is meant to go beyond the thinking of interstate violence but that the absence of violence affects people's everyday lives, their security, the way that they live them but negative peace doesn't tell you about what it takes to make or sustain a peaceful society. So for that we start to look at positive peace and that's the attitudes, institutions and structures that lead to mutual cooperation and benefit and help society move away from violence. So negative peace is sort of measuring what we don't want while positive peace is more about measuring what we do want. So I'm gonna give you the quick results from this year's Global Peace Index. On the negative peace side, and Daniel will tell you about the positive peace index. There are three groups involved in the Global Peace Index. The Institute for Economics and Peace, the Economist Intelligence Unit and an independent expert panel. They provide peer review of the results and the methodology so that we can make sure that the process is independent. We look at 22 indicators, both internal and external to a nation, ranging from measures of ongoing conflict which there are five, societal safety and security and militarization. So when we take these indicators, what have we found in the last year? The 2013 Global Peace Index shows that peace has had a slight deterioration in the last year and really the trend driving this was an increase in homicides and deaths from internal organized conflict. Internal organized conflict, you should note, has been driven by 70 deaths in Syria but also by continued deaths for instance in Mexico's drug war. So in the last year, the drug war in Mexico has claimed twice as many lives as the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and this has actually been a continuing trend that Daniel's going to elaborate on. When we map the results of the index, this is what it looks like and you can go to our website visionofhumanity.org. We have interactive maps where you can look at each country by indicator and year and see all of the data associated with each country. Green is more peaceful, red is less and one thing to notice is that there's quite a big regional spread and differentiation. This past year, the Middle East and North Africa has been the region that has decreased the most in peace. The top 10 most peaceful countries and I show this first because we hope to also focus on these countries and understand what we can learn from them led by Iceland once again. What's interesting here in the top 10 is that once you're in the top 10, you tend to stay there. There is a certain resiliency of the nations in the top 10. Japan, for instance, dropped out of the top 10 briefly after the tsunami but has regained its position. Now, looking at the least peaceful countries, Afghanistan is actually the least peaceful country this year, the list goes down in the opposite order and once again, the countries here have also been pretty much here since the index was first launched in 2007 and they tend to stay there. Seven of the 10 scores have deteriorated. In Afghanistan, it's less peaceful now in the 2013 index than it was in 2008 so less peaceful than Iraq was in 2008. Looking at the United States where we are now, we're 99th on the index. Some might presume that our involvement in international conflicts, militarization, are the only reasons that the United States scores the way that it does but it must be noted that our high incarceration rates, high homicides, availability of small arms also affect the US score and hold it down. These are the year's top rising nations and fallers. In the risers, we see a pattern each year, Libya, Sudan and Chad, they're always countries that are emerging from conflict and the biggest fallers tend to be the ones that are experiencing open armed conflict. These are the indicators that have improved this year. Likelihood of violent demonstrations has gone down. There's been a slight calming of the situation in Europe and in Arab spring countries. Negative indicators, once again, homicides. Honduras has the highest homicide rate in the world and that increased by 10 this past year. Military spending fell for the first time since 2008 in total terms but a greater number of countries increased their expenditure as a percentage of GDP. So when we look at the impact, we know that there's a social impact of violence but there's also an economic impact and each year the Institute for Economics and Peace looks at defining what that is for the year. What is the economic impact of violence? We found that in 2012 it was over $9 trillion which is about 11% of world GDP. This is what we're terming violence containment spending and it's the economic activity related to the consequences or prevention of violence. Now the report has a very detailed methodology on this that you can look through so I'm not gonna go through it but it ranges by country from North Korea where 20% of GDP is spent on violence containment to Iceland where 1% of GDP is spent on violence containment. But what does this mean in real terms? One year of violence containment spending is 75 times official development assistance. It means that each day we're spending $25 billion, $1,300 per person per year. So one year of this spending could almost pay off the total US government debt and more realistically just a 1% reduction in this would fund the additional amount required to achieve the Millennium Development Goals which is $60 billion per year. And we see that this violence containment industry is actually bigger than the world tourism sector, bigger than the agricultural sector. So it's a really useful way to illustrate not only the social imperative but the economic imperative of peace. And I'm gonna wrap it up here and let Daniel give you some more information about the trends we've identified as well as the links that we see between peace resilience and vulnerability. Thanks. Thanks, Daniel Hislop is the research director of the Institute for Economics and Peace. Sorry, can you hear me? Yeah, that's better. Sorry, I didn't know if anyone heard me then. I'm gonna start by recapping what the GPI data tells us about trends and violence. I think that's important because the GPI measures violence in many different ways. It measures interpersonal violence. It measures collective violence. It measures armed conflict, internal and external forms of violence. So by understanding those trends and what types of violence are the most important, we can, it's really a first step to understanding the drivers of violence and that's what this research project is really about. By understanding drivers, we can begin to understand what are the potential drivers of resilience. So looking at our six year trends, what you can see here is there has been a 5% reduction in the level of peacefulness. The GPI score has gone down. Many countries have improved but many have gone down as well and the deteriorations have outweighed the gains. One of the main reasons for the overall fall and Michelle alluded to a few of these is the fallen internal indicators. The measures of safety and security, homicide, violent crime, the level of incarceration, the number of police, those have been the indicators that have really fallen in the last six years globally. The external indicators have also fallen. But just to a much lesser extent. When we look at the distribution of GPI scores, we see a really key trend and it basically shows that peace is becoming more unequal. The countries at the bottom of the index, the bottom 15 to 20, you can see a sort of separated now from the rest of the distribution. In 2008, it was a more even distribution. You've now got that bottom 10 really separated and as Michelle said, countries like Afghanistan and Iraq are less peaceful than they were in 2008. At the top of the index, you've also got a split in the distribution. So those countries at the top are moving away. Regionally, the Middle East and North Africa has decreased the most, mostly due to the Arab Spring, but South Asia is still the least peaceful region. And I think it's important to note that Russia and Eurasia, that the Commonwealth independent states are actually less peaceful on average than Sub-Saharan Africa as a region. I think one of the more striking trends about the quantitative data in the GPI this year is the increase in global homicides. When we look at the UNODC data that we use, we can see that there's been a sustained increase and it's quite a big increase. And if we go back to 2000, that trend has actually been continuing. The really important thing to note about this is that regionally, it's quite unequally distributed. Central America and Caribbean, South America and Sub-Saharan Africa have all seen a gradual increase, but the rest of the world has remained more or less the same. And that follows a pretty well-established trend that we're aware of in the US and the UK. We've seen declining homicide rates and certainly in parts of Europe, but it's not the case in many other parts of the world. In the Global Peace Index, we measure terrorism via our Global Terrorism Index, and that takes account of the number of deaths from terrorism, the number of injuries, and the level of property damage that occurs from terrorism. And that's also increased since 2002. It peaked in 2007. The main reason for that was Iraq, the height of Iraq's sectarian violence, and at that stage, Iraq accounted for about 50% of the global total of terrorism. Whilst Iraq has improved, several other countries, Afghanistan, India, and Nigeria have actually increased in their levels of terrorism, and it's really important to note that this is mostly domestic terrorism. The great majority of this is by domestic actors. The other thing to note is that armed conflict deaths, the number of deaths from organised internal conflict has also increased. So from 2007 to 2012, the average was about 111,000. The previous four years, it was about 52,000, so it's a significant increase. It's not just because of what's happened in Syria, although Syria has accounted for a great majority of the increase in deaths in 2012. It's also because many other countries have seen quite large increases. In 2007, there were only five countries that had more than 2,000 armed conflict deaths. In 2012, there's 11, so the breadth and intensity of armed conflict deaths has increased. Also, it's important that we note that homicide still is the main way that people die in a violent death. Criminal violence really is the main, I guess, indicator that we need to look at when we're looking at violent deaths. So just when we cap off those trends, I think there's three really key takeaways. One, we've seen this increase in internal violence, those safety and security metrics really deteriorating. Two, an inequality in the level of peace, so those bottom 10 really becoming less peaceful. And three, the magnitudes of those decreases outweighing the improvements. And whilst these trends are useful and they're important to tell us about short-term progress, they don't really tell us much about long-term institution building and resilience building. And while the GPI is very good at that short-term progress, it doesn't tell us anything about the institutions. What it does provide us with is a statistical base which we can use to analyze violence, a multi-dimensional measure of violence against many other metrics. And what we did is take the GPI and essentially analyze it statistically with many other cross-country datasets. And we came up with this framework called the Pillars of Peace, which is meant to be a starting point for us to think about the key attitudes, institutions, and structures which help sustain a more peaceful society. They're things that perhaps are not that surprising, well-functioning government, sound business environment, the free flow of information, low levels of corruption. Acceptance of the rights of others is really trying to look at informal norms of trust and tolerance between different ethnic, religious groups. High levels of human capital is referring to the standard of education in a country, but also levels of youth development and good relations with neighbors, which is trying to measure social capital and norms of trust between not just citizens, but also between states. And equitable distribution of resources refers not just to income inequality, but also to the equitable access to health and education. And the really key thing that we like to emphasize about this framework is that these factors are interrelated. We need to think about them in an interrelated manner. If you have a deficit in one of the pillars, that has the potential to undermine other pillars. We're not trying to say that A equals B in terms of causality. What this is trying to emphasize is that the factors are interdependent. Causality can go both ways, and it really does depend on the country context and the circumstances in a country as to which factors will be more important. So what we've done with that framework is to then try and build a measure out of it as we do. And we've called this the positive piece index. It's essentially 24 indicators, which have all been empirically derived by the correlation to the GPI. This is really trying to be a multi-dimensional measure of institutional capacity. The really important thing is that it counts formal and informal institutions, and we're really trying to capture positive states as opposed to negative states. So we're trying to measure the things that we want, not the things that we don't want. And what we do when we do that exercise is we get a measure, a single number, that measures institutional capacity. And it's really a proxy for thinking about resilience against external economic, political, environmental shocks. I think there's a few things that we learn from this exercise. Obviously, the darker blue countries are the countries with more positive piece. They have more resilience. But what we see when we track this data, and we've done it now with 10 years with the data, is that these institutions move very slowly over time. From 2005 to 2010, there was only a 1.7% change, so they really do move slowly. And once you have them, it's both very hard to get rid of them, but it's also very hard to build them up. The other thing to note about this is that there are a lot of countries that you can see that are gray. The data just doesn't exist, and it's a real challenge to measure institutional capacity at a national level with the current stock of data. It just doesn't, it's just not there, especially in formal institutions. Now what I want to quickly show is how we can think about this, how we can think about the relationship between violence and positive peace. And basically what we see in this scatter plot is the countries on the bottom left are those that are peaceful, that have institutional capacity. Those countries, it's probably not surprising, a lot of them are Western European. They tend to be higher income. They tend to be with full democratic governance structures. Although it is important to note there are some exceptions. You've got countries like Qatar and Singapore, which are hybrid regimes, very close to the blue area. And essentially, those countries are more peaceful and they tend to have more equitable distribution of resources. They tend to have lower levels of corruption. They tend to have better business environments and all the other pillars that make up a more peaceful society. On the top right, those countries are both violent and vulnerable. They are the countries that really have a risk of falling into a vicious cycle of conflict and fragility. And I think one thing to note, when we look at the change in these metrics over time, is that positive peace is a really good proxy for vulnerability. So what we see on this particular graph is that the longer the arrow, the bigger the change in peace. So the red arrows show a country really falling into conflict. And the important thing to see is that countries up until about 40th in both indexes see very little change relatively. It's after that that you then tend to see quite a lot of movement. And in 2008, some of the biggest flaws in the GPI, some of the countries that experienced the most amount of violence in the last six years had quite big positive peace deficits. Syria, Rwanda, Madagascar and Egypt all fell quite a lot on the GPI. I think one of the challenges for us when we're thinking about development is the balance between the long-term and short-term humanitarian assistance. There is no correlation really between positive peace measures and ODAs. Similarly, there's not really a correlation between a change in ODAs and a change in peace. Oh, sorry. ODAs stand for Official Development Assistance. So what we see is actually many countries which have fallen on the GPI, have become more violent, have also experienced an ODA shock, which basically means they've received more than less than 15% of their ODAs in a previous year. So I'm just gonna get to the final slide and really come back to the main point of the exercise and the presentation, which is to emphasize that peace and violence is an important measure of human well-being and progress and to show the relationship between violence, peace, the Millennium Development Goals and other development metrics. What we see here is countries that are higher on the Global Peace Index that are more peaceful tend to have higher MDG achievement and this was really soundly established in the World Development Report in 2011. We know that conflict has a really big, important influence on development. And as Michelle sort of mentioned about the economic costings, it is critical to highlight that it's not only low income countries that suffer from violence economically, it's also middle and high income countries like the US. And I think going forward, one of the real challenges will be to develop better data to measure these things and to develop more frameworks and better frameworks to think about resilience in the future. So I think with that I'll leave my comments and maybe move to the panel. Thanks. Thanks very much, Danielle. And thank you, Michelle, as well, for that excellent and brief summary of a very long and detailed report, which I believe all of you have on your chairs there and those of you watching through the internet can obviously download from the Institute of Economics and Peace website. We have a distinguished panel of discussants to offer some brief thoughts about the results of the 2013 Global Peace Index, beginning with Alejandro Ponce. Dr. Ponce is the chief research officer at the World Justice Project and such as the co-author of the World Justice Project's Rule of Law Index, so he's not unfamiliar with the world of data analysis and linking it to policy. He's a former economist at the World Bank and he's going to offer some brief comments about the 2013 Global Peace Index. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for the invitation. First of all, I would like to congratulate the Institute for Economics and Peace and the authors in particular for producing this report. I have been on the other side and producing the World Justice Project's Rule of Law Index report and I know the enormous amount of work that is behind each one of the numbers and each one of the sentences and so on. So congratulations on a very good work. I would like to, my remarks are basically going to be just from the perspective of building indicators and I will touch a little bit on the results but mainly on how I see the contribution of this report into the field. And just first of all, in order to have impact with this kind of reports, I think there are three very important things or three basic things that reports have to have. They have to be serious. They have to be objective and they have to be easy to understand or just to visualize. And I think this report has these three characteristics. So just, I think there are three reasons why I think this report is important. The first one, which I found extremely interesting is the framework that has been developed during the last few years and that make up this index. The framework is not only, it allows us to understand violence and how it affects people. So when I first read it, I noticed that it's not only about conflict that some of us sometimes think about when we talk about peace, that it's about conflict. No, it's not only about conflict. It's about crime. It's about political violence. So it allows us to really understand violence in a comprehensive way. The report also provides a very interesting exercise on the cost of violence, which I actually just being a methodological geek, I went to check the methodology and so on and it's very interesting how it is built and what it's most interesting, I think is that it does the exercise for a large number of countries. So takes just the basic framework of the GPI and goes a little bit deeper trying to understand what would be the cost of all these things that we see, why they matter and how much they cost to us. And I think that the numbers are very interesting. The third part is that they actually look just what Daniel was presenting. They try to look a little bit further into the determinants of peace. And I think this is an extremely difficult exercise. So I think what they do is just simply putting the first piece, just opening the road because this is extremely just country specific, just indicator specific. I think something that Daniel mentioned and that is explained very well in the report is that the way to look at this is as a system and they make an analogy as a forest in which there are trees, there are animals, there are fountains and so on. And all of them interrelate into an environment. So it's a very interesting way to think about this but obviously really to go a little bit deeper and really think about risk assessments of how vulnerable is a country, it will require much more deeper studies on each one of the components at the country level. The second part that I find very interesting is that it provides obviously assessments that allow us just to see how countries are in a given point in time as well as monitoring progress. Something that I found very interesting is that it's multi-dimensional. It's not only simply a hidden number that nobody knows how it's obtained but when talking about the country, describing the country is the fact that there are many different dimensions allow us to see for each one of the countries what is really determining each one of the rankings that they have. So that's, I found extremely, extremely interesting. Today in the morning I opened the newspaper in Mexico Reforma and it was in the cover page just the index and I read the article and it really just touches a lot of the issues that are happening in Mexico. The third one which is probably most important to us as an audience is that it gives voice, really this kind of report provides a tool really and gives voice to victims. So which is really why we care about these kind of things. It gives an extra tool to practitioners and a voice to victims. Indicators in general can be very powerful because they can make accountable the different stakeholders. So with the different constituencies, it can be international constituencies just donors or it can be local constituencies which are probably the most important ones. So I think indicators in general just providing a very simplified framework just tools for the civil society and the different stakeholders to sustain accountability. Finally, I think that the report is very timely. Just given the trends that we just saw on deteriorating peace, I think we're at the right moment just to see something. I think the analysis that they did on just the different trends during the last five years and the different determinants, I think it's very timely. Just obviously there are issues that are not touched because they are complicated just spill over effects around different countries and so on but I think the report is extremely timely on the situations. In general it gives us ways to identify weaknesses, monitor change and ultimately just find ways to advance peace just in conjunction with economic development and the advancement of the rule of law. Thank you very much. Our next discussant is Mike Lofgren. He was for 28 years a professional staff member of the US Congress most recently with the Senate Budget Committee. He has a great deal of experience on the relationship between budgeting and national security and as such is clearly qualified to speak on the issue of the relationship between peace and economics. He's also author of The Party is Over, How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless and the Middle Class Got Shafted. CSIS being a non-partisan institution takes no position on the Bulgarian's title but we're certainly glad to have Mr. Lofgren here. Thank you very much. And now as the saying goes, something completely different. My involvement with this project goes all the way back to about last Thursday. So forgive me for that. However, I will try to make it relevant with subject matter torn as it were from today's headlines. I appreciate the opportunity to comment on the Global Peace Index. The fact that I'm an American born and raised in the Midwest will hopefully excuse the rather parochial emphasis on my remarks today and my possible failure to encompass the international scope of the report. But it was eye-opening to see that the United States, Lincoln's last best hope for mankind scored 99th out of 162 ranked countries on the index of peacefulness. That's in the 39th percentile. I calculate that the U.S. ranks 31 among the 34 countries of the OECD. The report says the U.S. has improved since the previous ranking, putting us one notch above China. That's really something to celebrate, isn't it? Among the bottom 10 countries, no fewer than five, Yemen, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, and Afghanistan are experiencing or have recently experienced U.S. military action. Certainly, none of these countries was comparable to Switzerland before the U.S. intervened, but hopes that intervention might apply a soothing balm of peacefulness do not appear fulfilled either. Samantha Power, please take note. The United States, and I'm being totally serious, is the driver of the international system. Its example matters crucially. It also appears worth noting that the permanent five U.S. United Nations Security Council members are not exactly models. Their average score is 90, which would put them collectively ahead of the U.S., but still in the lower half of the 162 ranked countries. This may give us a clue as to why the U.N. does not work very well in averting conflicts. As to the methodology of the report, I have no quarrels. I would point out, averting to headlines, that physical violence in a state of peace, at least as I think the report defines a state of peace, are not always diametric opposites. A better way to put it is that an absence of physical violence is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for a state of peace. Other qualities must be present before one sees the social climate that exists among the top 10 countries. For there can be little violent crime in a country and minimal overt physical brutality by the authorities, and one can still have a condition that is the opposite of social peace. With the dizzying advance of technology, coercive control of populations through physical violence may become a thing of the past, at least in technologically advanced countries. Now imagine if you will a nation where every electronic trace of every individual is collected and archived for potential future use. The National Security Agency is constructing a $2 billion data storage facility in Utah due to open in a few months that can store the equivalent of 500 quintillion pages of data. Picture the day when every light pole on every street is festooned with CCTV cameras and with infrared motion sensors that can see through the walls of your house. Imagine when everyone's DNA is forcibly collected, something on which the Supreme Court has just now cracked the door open. RFID tags may be required of all employed persons to monitor their whereabouts. Bumblebee-sized surveillance drones will swarm everywhere. Now ask yourselves, could such a society dispense with death squads, beatings in detention cells and all the other stigmata of violently repressive police states and still be a highly coercive and totalitarian society? When governments view the people not as citizens, but as criminal suspects, it is the opposite of social peace, regardless of the crime rate or any presence of judicial or extrajudicial killings. There would exist a permanent state of war of government against people. That may seem like speculation far from the immediate subject of this report, which is about the scourge of both individual and state-organized violence, but I believe we must think more creatively about what a society at peace ought to look like and how we get there. For it is hollow progress if mitigation of physical violence is achieved by Orwellian techniques that injure the autonomy and dignity of human beings and which do so by slow and imperceptible degrees that make it difficult to assess until it is too late. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mike. And I'd like to have Sean Carroll, who's a senior director of cross-functional and new markets group at Creative Associates. He's also the former chief of staff and chief operating officer at USAID. He's a development professional who's been in the field for about 25 years and has operated in 55 countries. And it is our pleasure to hear Sean Carroll give some brief comments. Thank you, Dan. Thanks, Dan. Thanks, Michelle, for having me today. I almost didn't make it. My voice may not make it. So I'll push ahead and see how we do. Thank you and congrats, the Institute for Economics and Peace on this 2013 Global Peace Index. And thank you to CSIS for hosting us. I wanted to focus on youth and their peace in the peace as it were. Half the world's under the age of 30. What's in the report is affected by them and of course is of utmost importance to them. And particularly focus on the fact there are 357 million youth between the age of 15 and 24 who are what are sometimes affectionately referred to as needs, neither in education nor employment nor any form of training. So that's about one in three, 15 to 24 year olds. And violence and being out of school and out of work is a vicious cycle that feeds on each other. I'd like to focus a little bit on Central America and look at where they sort of come out on the index here but also what we're seeing in our work at creative on crime and violence prevention and youth programming in four countries in Central America. The Central American countries aren't in the top 10 or the bottom 10. They're sort of all in the middle with some spread and some interesting spread that I'd like to comment on and maybe ask the authors to comment on. But there is, as you pointed out, a focus on homicides and that the increase in the number of homicides up 8% over the last year is almost entirely attributed to Southern Africa and to Latin America and with Honduras as you've pointed out, showing up 10 homicides per 100,000 population. They're up to 92 and that's the highest in the world. But several other countries in Central America are close behind El Salvador at 71. Guatemala's had a big drop off in the last few years and I'll comment on that. Panama and Nicaragua much lower and there's some differences there. Michael Schifter last year encountering criminal violence in Central America of course pointed out what a lot of the reasons are. It's one of geography sandwiched between the big drug producing countries and the largest drug consumer in the US. Remnants of civil wars, a lot of weapons and gunmen, high rates of poverty, weak underfunded and sometimes corrupt governments. And when we are looking at communities where we want to institute a youth program and open up a youth center, we now have 104 in four countries in Central America starting in 2006. We sort of see 13 risk factors and some of them show up in the index but others don't and one of my questions to you would be should some more of these be reflected? I think particularly in the positive peace index it looks much more macro than it does macro. When I think about youth at the community level and what the odds they're facing and the violence they're facing and what's needed to overcome that and to avoid those risks, I'm not sure that we see it all inside the index. You know we see weak local government that certainly you have in there. Large number of kids as I've mentioned not in school are working broken families, poor quality education opportunities, lack of mentors and established programs where they can have mentors, gangs and drugs of course, bad infrastructure and inability to access opportunities that are outside their immediate community in their immediate area. But we sort of see kind of five buckets of development assets and again I would ask and I would challenge you to figure out a way to have some of these opportunities or these needed development assets for youth to move into positive adulthood and to avoid a life of crime and violence and somehow how can we get those again I would think into the positive peace index. Now these sort of five development assets are having a life plan, being a change agent, using free time constructively, being committed to education and continuing one's education and taking healthy, making healthy decisions. I'm gonna just give you a few figures from what we've seen over time in the communities where we're working because it's pretty striking. We started in Guatemala in 2006 in Hondura and we're out of Guatemala so those youth centers are continuing in a sustainable way with local government, municipal government, church entities involved and of course that's hugely important that these outreach centers where vulnerable youth who are subjected to violence and crime can go, it's hugely important that those are sustainable and those continue going. So as I mentioned in Guatemala, though creative and USAID, which has funded this programming is not active in this anymore that the youth centers continue. We've been more recently in Panama, Honduras and El Salvador and again, if you look at the murder rates, Central America as a region is fourth amazingly and absolute numbers is fourth in the world behind only Southern Asia and South America and Eastern Africa but it's second in terms of its rate per 100,000 and again, we mentioned specifically the high rates of Honduras and Salvador dropped somewhat in the last few years in Guatemala and then lower in Nicaragua and Panama. One thing that's happening in Central America and it would be interesting to see how this shows up is how the governments are changing their plans. From a hard iron fisted to more prevention and we heard one police chief in San Pedro Sula which is the murder capital of the world say, prevention we've got to be passionately involved in prevention, it's the only way. Another police official saying, we saw one youth center open and we saw the crime rate drop and at first we thought, well that's interesting and then we saw another youth center and another part of town and the crime rate dropped there and we thought, hmm, extremely interesting. By the third one, he believed there was really some causality here. In Panama from 2011 to 2013, the perception among the communities where the program is active, perception of security went up 60, sorry, 24% in Cologne where we also have centers that went from 24% up to 68% of the population feeling more secure and the number of homicides in Panama dropped from 2009 to 2013, 26%. You're seeing it, let me just give some last figures here in three communities in El Salvador in Santa Ana which is the largest of these three. The crime rate has remained steady even when it dropped from 2009 to 2010 and then went up again in 2011 about back to the level of 2009. But where we have our youth community centers where there's a safe place for youth to go, it's dropped by a third. In Chalchuapa where we have much broader coverage, it's gone from 67 homicides and 67 in 2010 down to 38. So it's almost half there and that'll con go similarly, it's gone down about 50%. So we're seeing there can be a great effect when youth actually have a way to avoid these risk factors and getting them into crime and violence. I think it's gonna take some time and probably it's gonna take more coverage, the cost for a youth in our program is about $70 per year in Panama but incarceration is $17,000 a year. So, and it's a fairly large program but you realize it's not nearly large enough. You go back to the one in three, 15 to 24 year olds around the world out of work and out of school and you realize you need a lot more provision of development assets through youth centers, through programming, through opportunities and activities which move youth into positive adulthood. I think it'll take time and it'll take more of these kinds of prevention programs led by governments, led by donors, led by local entities that are providing the services and the programs but it would be interesting to see how or if these issues of crime and violence at the local level and youth being both perpetrators of and victims of it could show up more in these indices. Thank you very much. Thanks very much, John. Melanie Greenberg is president and CEO of the Alliance for Peace Building and she's formerly the president and founder of the Cyprus Fund for Peace and Security. She's a longtime player in the conflict, post-conflict peace building and nuclear non-proliferation worlds and it's our pleasure to hear your comments as well. Thanks. Well thank you very much, Bob and to Michelle and Daniel for just a magnificent report and it's just a great pleasure to be here. When Michelle said we are moving away from a utopian narrative of peace I'm not sure she imagined we would have this, I would say it goes beyond an Orwellian vision. I think we're heading into the total recall category but it does make us think very hard about the nature of peace and the nature of violence and one comment I'd like to make just at the very beginning before I move on to other remarks is that the peace building community I don't think has done a very good job about getting our arms around criminal violence and the kinds of regional and external forces that are driving violence and homicide and so much of the world and so I think the Global Peace Index and it's focusing on those and in our discussions today has really done us a service and that we as a peace building community need to move forward on that. It's hard to believe that it's only been six years since the Global Peace Index was first presented. It has become such a touchstone of our field and I find even in my own consciousness that when I read a story about, for example, the riots recently outside Stockholm I find myself secretly wondering if Sweden is gonna go down in the Global Peace Index this year. So it's really just wonderful work and we're very grateful in our community. So you're giving us these very tangible numbers and stories and narratives that we can use in our own work. So one of the most interesting things that I find every year in the Global Peace Index is the stories that it tells about different kinds of states, different trends. How do we see the Arab Spring playing out in these numbers? How do we think about wealthy Scandinavian countries versus countries that are struggling in a post-conflict setting in other places in the world? One of the most interesting stories to emerge this year and at a very special time in the international global policy process are around fragile states. These are states that have very high rates of violence. 1.5 billion people live in conflict affected and fragile states. A very, very small number of them, if any, has reached a single millennium development goal. And if you scratch not very far below the surface, you see real tales of human suffering, of hopes being dashed, of an inability to have a future for their children that people want. So thinking about fragile states and what these numbers tell us about them is important for many, many reasons. But if you look at the bottom 10 of the Global Peace Index, you'll see that five of those are members of the G7 Plus, a self-proclaimed group of fragile states. So Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Central African Republic. So what does this tell us about the nature of peace and development and the need to be thinking about peace and development in harmony? People often talk about conflict as being development in reverse. It's impossible to build institutions and to move out of fragility towards what the positive peace index would tell us as resilience when conflict is raging. But it's a chicken and egg kind of problem because without the kind of institutions and opportunities that development presents, it's so easy to slide back into conflict. So how do we move further down that scatter map and shorten the arrows that Daniel was telling us about? So I'd like to talk about two glimmers of hope in that process that are happening right now as we speak in the global community. And the first is for those of you who follow the post-2015 process, what will be replacing the Millennium Development Goals, the high-level panel that was appointed by Secretary Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations to map out a course for what the post-2015 development framework will look like, issued their long-awaited report last week. And we in the peace-building community were really delighted because out of the five central themes that the report highlighted, one of them was dedicated to peace. And it wasn't peace in a Nambi-Pambi kind of utopian way. It was saying that peace is not only an integral part of development, but a necessary goal for all people, something for us all to aspire to. So this gave us a lot of hope that as we move through the post-2015 process, that peace will not be left as part of the Millennium Declaration as it was in 2000, but will really be a robust goal and integrated throughout all of the other goals in the high-level panel. Now in many ways, this is not surprising that if you look at the makeup of the high-level panel, it included David Cameron from the UK, who's long been a proponent of mixing peace-building and development, John Podesta here from the Center for American Progress, very strong American voice for these issues, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the president of Liberia, whose own country has been a pioneer in blending peace-building and development, and Emilia Perez, the finance minister of Timor-Leste, who was one of the co-chairs of the International Dialogue on Peace-Building and State-Building, which I'll get to later. So peace emerges as a goal, it was universal, which means that it's not only for Sierra Leone and Afghanistan and DRC, but for the United States and Sweden and Finland that all countries must reach towards peace and towards the indicators of peace for this to be a successful goal. But I think equally interesting was what happens when you move below the principles level? When you start looking at the actual goals and targets set out in the high-level panel, they start to look very much like the pillars of peace that are outlined in the positive peace index, which you can find on page 77 and further in the global peace index this year. And what this report is saying and what the post-2015 framework will look like is that in order for sustainable development to take hold, you need to focus on security, that security forces be professional, accessible, and respectful of human rights, that there be equal access to justice, that all citizens be able to access judicial processes to grain redress for wrongs in their societies, that violence against women and children is eliminated, that jobs are provided so that in the, what was the acronym, the NEETS, that in that framework that people can graduate from school and move on to jobs and be productive members of the economy rather than taking up arms. And most important that legitimate governance is the basis for all development, that civil society and citizens need to have participation in their own governments and to start forming those institutions that Daniel mentioned takes so long but you need to start somewhere, that even if it's democratic with a small D, that civil society and civilians have a stake in their own government and how they're governed. So we as the Alliance for Peace Building, along with the Institute for Economics and Peace are working hard to make sure that there's civil society for support for this framework of peace building within the, what will replace the high level panel will move into an open working group and eventually the adoption at the General Assembly of the United Nations of the post-2015. But another highlight and as process that really informed the high level panel was something called the New Deal for Engagement in Fragile States. And I won't go into great detail except to say that it's an innovative development process that operates around peace building and state building goals. Recognizing that peace building and development need to go hand in hand. And if you look at the peace building and state building goals they look like the pillars of peace. It's all around jobs, legitimate governance, accessible security, human rights. Eight of the pilot countries of the New Deal are represented in the bottom 10 of the Global Peace Index. But what the high level panel, I'm sorry, what the New Deal seeks to do is to help each country map its way out of fragility in its own way with the support of donors and a very robust international, domestic, civil society participation. It answers the question of the slowness of the development of institutions. This is trying to fast track the kind of institutional development that will eventually lead to peace. It helps us understand how to measure peace and Camille Shippa from the Institute for Economics and Peace has been very engaged and how do you develop indicators to measure things like civil society engagement? It's very difficult. And especially when you get to issues of perceptual data of how, for example, women see violence against them. Well, there might be a decline in the number of rapes reported. It might not be because they're fewer rapes. It might be because women don't feel safe enough to report them. So how do you integrate that perceptual and formal kind of data into more of the formal processes that we have now? And how do we start to link better development assistance with peace-building goals in these countries so that development is really effective and that official development assistance is not wasted? So I think I'll stop there and say that the Global Peace Index gives us the raw data and a sense of trends that we need in these very complex international processes. And we'll really look forward to working with you to make some of the dreams that you have for your work take hold in the international environment. Thanks very much, Melanie. Before we turn to audience question and answer session, I'd like to ask Michelle and Daniel to respond briefly to some of the comments made by the discussants. While they're speaking, I'd like to invite those of you who are watching the live webcast, either through the CSIS website or through the Hive, to send any questions that you might have for the Q&A to my email address at rdlamb at csis.org. And I will choose some of those questions as well if they're compelling enough. So I'd like to have Michelle and Daniel just respond very briefly and then we'll turn to the audience Q&A. Thanks. Thanks, Bob. And thank you, everyone, on the panel for your comments. I think I'll just very quickly address what you were talking about, Sean, about youth development and the need to have youth development metrics in the positive piece framework and certainly an important thing that we think about when we think about drivers of violence. One thing that IEP, Institute for Economics and Peace, has been working on in conjunction with the Commonwealth Secretary is a youth development index. And we've become very familiar with the sorts of data problems that one runs into when you try and get disaggregated data for youth, 15 to 24 or 15 to 29. And the difficulties there really are quite significant. I'll just take one example. If we wanted to measure the level of youth unemployment at the national level, if we take the example of Sierra Leone, UN statistics might report that the youth unemployment rate is 7%. So that would put it in one of the best countries in the world for youth unemployment. You then go to NGOs working on the ground in Sierra Leone and they say, well, it's actually 70%, which would make it one of the worst in the world. You then go to another source and you look at the African Development Bank and they say, well, it's about 36%. So the data difficulties around youth specific issues is really quite significant. And I think, Sean, of course, the point that prevention against violence is obviously the critical thing. We know the human capital loss of incarcerating young people is devastating. And we really should be working towards prevention rather than incarceration. The cost benefit just doesn't really work. Michelle, did you wanna respond to any of the other comments on the panel or? Okay, I was gonna say, Melanie, it's a very unhealthy obsession to start thinking about what happens in Sweden and then I wonder what will happen to the GPI score. I find myself doing the same thing. Certainly one thing that this work is directed towards at the moment is what is going on at the UN and in the post-2015 process. They have identified that peace is going to be a critical pillar. But I think one of the key issues will certainly be not only just measuring violence but also measuring the drivers of violence and that's where that debate will be, I think, quite tricky. And certainly the need to develop better data is a recurrent theme. It's something that we really can't measure these things unless we get better information on what's actually happening. I think I just wanted to add a sort of a final point that while we do present the global peace index and the positive peace index separately, what we're really trying to do between those two measures and the combination of violence containment spending is to present a more holistic view of the measurement of peace and security in people's lives but also in our communities. So while we say this is the level of violence and this is where we see the institutional capacity, we don't advocate for a complete elimination of violence containment or violence containment spending. And so we hope to say that there should be a recognition of a balance that we need to identify in a society between rule of law, violence containment, numbers of police, levels of incarceration and also those certain structures and attitudes and institutions that will help sustain that and then eventually will hopefully help reduce the need for so much violence containment spending. And while we don't have this perfect balance or perfect number, that's the kind of framework that we're trying to work towards. Thank you very much. If you have a question, I would like to request that you raise your hand, identify yourself and your affiliation and state your question in the form of a question. Please keep it brief. We will have a lot of questions. Please keep your question brief and focused as much as possible on the Global Peace Index. I'm gonna make one minor exception to that because I'm going to ask Paula Bryan, who's the Vice President of Policy and Campaigns at Oxfam to ask the first question and I will let him offer a couple of comments before asking his question. He was supposed to be one of the speakers up here but he had a conflict for the early part so we figured we'd just have you give the first comment. Thanks very much. Thanks, Robert. Well, I won't go on too long but it's been really fascinating to hear what I've heard and I'm sorry I missed the beginning of it. I thought it was fascinating. I was a little depressed to read that having just gone from being an Irish citizen to being an American citizen that large countries don't do so well but apparently I can't take that back and I don't really want to. Here's, I want to engage you both if I could, Michelle and Daniel, in a thought experiment. I'm sure many others will love the report but let's say it got a lot of political traction in this town and let's say that somebody explicitly made the connection between President Obama's pledge in the State of the Union to end extreme poverty and your use of this indicator to map out where peace and poverty perhaps are connected in the more holistic way that you're talking about because I think what many people are saying is if we're gonna actually reach President Obama's goal, well, China's actually taking care of a lot of the extreme poor and so will India but fragile states, as Melanie said, we don't have that answer so I think a lot of us are gonna be much more focused on this and so you're ahead of the game is my view and that would be another reason people should read the report but my here's my thought experiment question. What would the US government, if that was true, what would the US government be investing a lot more in and what would it be investing a lot less in? What institutions would probably profit from everybody taking your index more seriously and which ones would probably not be so thrilled? And I, actually, no, let me just leave it there. So who's gonna be the winner and who's gonna be the loser if this gets more traction? Thanks, Paul. Tricky question. We tend to shy away from these sorts of policy questions but I think one thing that the economic costing exercise and the research does demonstrate is the fact that development is synonymous with security in a lot of these fragile states. So while the tendency may be to think military spending is the best way to do that, some of this research would imply that investment in development is actually a very good way of boosting security, global security. And I think if you look at, you know, to get more specific I think last year we looked at violence containment spending in the United States, the amount of money that the United States economy spends on containing and dealing with the consequences of violence. The federal budget has a significant portion of, and Mike can probably talk about this as well, committed to military spending, but also to homeland security, to incarceration, to police. Those sorts of expenditures are fundamentally unproductive and the implication is if you can reduce your violence containment spending and transfer that money into other areas that are potentially more economically productive, but also, you know, can be transferred into development, then that would be a far more productive way to spend time and money. So I don't know if that answers the question, but can I just add for about 15 seconds. Part of the problem is that when you see the privatization of things like prisons, it changes the equation because a social cost becomes somebody's shareholder value and the constituency becomes much louder and much more difficult to deal with. Yeah, I'd like to invite again the internet to send questions to rdlamb at csis.org. So far the humans in the room are outpacing you. So let's see, let's start here in the front and just wait for the microphone, please, if you would. Thank you. My name is Carol Spence, I'm with the Peace Alliance. My husband and I, John, are Virginia representatives for the Peace Alliance. My question is, have there been any figures done on the drug trafficking trade and the murders? What percentage of murders do we see that are impacted from drug trafficking? Thanks for the question. In our data, we don't disaggregate drug-related homicides. Certainly when you look at Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, a lot of those high homicide rates that we're talking about and Sean alluded to it is related to drug crime, the drug war. Mexico had, as Michelle pointed out in her presentation, 25,000 conflict deaths last year. That's almost as much as a country like Libya that had 30,000 in a full-blown civil war. So the number of deaths from drug-related violence is very significant. In terms of getting exact figures, I'm not aware of any, it's a very difficult task, but it's certainly a very huge part of violent deaths in Central America, especially. Good question in the back, please. Hi, thank you. My name is Karen Volcker and I'm with Cure Violence. And my question relates to, based on your analysis, how important is it to decrease violence in order to make progress on the pillars of peace? And how does the level of violence impact or affect your answer? If you look at the relationship between violence and positive peace, it really is quite a clear association. As you lower violence, institutions can develop and recover and violence is an interrupter of many of those core institutions. So there very much is a direct relationship. As I said in the presentation there, it is gonna depend on the type of violence we're talking about and the mix of institutions in a specific country. That's as about as detailed as I can give it in a generalized way. It will depend on the country context and the circumstances of that country. The internet is catching up with the live bodies. We have a question from Caroline Baxter at the Rand Corporation, which I will rephrase and elaborate because it's along the lines of questions that I have as well. In your presentation and your report, you've found a fairly low correlation between official development assistance and improvements in peace. This is actually fairly consistent with other research that's found that low income, fragile and conflict affected countries up until 2011 had not achieved any of the Millennium Development Goals. Some of those goals had been achieved in about 20 of those countries since then. But that's still not a particularly impressive showing for the international development community's efforts to improve on peacefulness and other development outcomes in the sorts of countries we're talking about here. But beyond the general observation that ODA is generally not very effective in these areas, clearly there are some efforts that are effective, more effective than others. And Caroline says that in some of her research that non-material aid on issues like education and law enforcement do tend to be somewhat more effective than material aid. And so I'd like to pose that question to actually everybody on the panel because you all have perspectives on this question and to comment more generally on how can the official development assistance community do a better job in conflict affected, fragile and violent countries? Melanie looks like she wants to answer. Good, thank you. Looking from a civil society perspective, there is a wonderful book that came out recently called Time to Listen by Dana Brown at CDA Collaborative Learning Projects that interviewed thousands of people around the world on their perspectives on receiving aid. And what most of them said was first of all, aid is often ineffective when it strictly goes through governments, when governments are not interviewing their own citizens about what would be most effective. So official aid comes in, it can swamp, economically swamp a region and inflate prices, sometimes create more harm than good in these very fragile environments. And if civil society were consulted and there were a process where individual communities could decide what were their needs, how to build institutions their way, that could go a long way towards increasing the effectiveness and that's being tried right now through the New Deal. And what I would emphasize is that as of 2011, there has been quite a lot of progress. The fact that there have been 20 fragile states that will meet at least one goal and several more that will very likely meet another goal, that's good news. I think the other thing to emphasize is that foreign direct investment is now a very big part of development in these places. Foreign FDIs outweigh ODAs in many contexts. So it's not just about ODAs. And I'd like to, I'll take this opportunity to press a series of reports that my program is in the process of publishing on absorptive capacity. We have a couple of copies of the report out there. And one of the things we found that was that the issue of aid effectiveness when obstacles are found on aid in fragile and conflict-affected countries is that it's often treated as a technical issue that technical capacity building can solve the problem. But in our research, we found that it's actually has a lot more to do, at least as much to do with the political economy of the recipient country at the local and sectoral levels, as well as with the donor's own capacity to deliver on its promises, which turns out to be significantly lower than I think all of us optimistically believe. Other questions in the front here, please. Wave for the microphone, please, thanks. Good afternoon, Andrew Smith. I'm an independent researcher from Australia. Good to hear another Aussie accent, who I understood everything you said. My question relates to the Cartesian distribution, where you plotted GPI against PPI figures. The observation I'd make is I was struck by how similar that is to a distribution that Dr Tony Murnie did from Australia did in some work, where he was plotting a range of indices against rule of law score for countries. And in fact, the distribution, just intuitively, is almost identical in terms of shape. I'd need to look at it in more detail to see if countries are in the same place as intuitively, I suspect they would be. Perhaps the thing that is most striking about it, and this is the point that Tony makes, is that there are really no outright outliers. Virtually every country is somewhere along the medium diagonal. There's a few that are a bit further away, but there are none that have a very high value on one particular index and a low one on the other. And perhaps the significance of that is, and it supports perhaps some of the pessimism we might have about how we fix things, is that there are no quick fixes. You just can't fix one thing, and then suddenly see a rapid increase in say, GPI or something like that, that more likely what you will see is countries progress up and down the mean diagonal is a more agonising sort of two steps forward, one step back type process. And the remainder of the international community that for its own reasons is trying to improve that is gonna have the patience and the endurance to keep plowing in the resources to enable countries to move. From your observation of countries that have moved up and down the diagonal, is that what you are seeing, or are there any indications of optimistic quick fixes? Daniel agrees with everything you just said. And I understood it very clearly. Thanks for the question. It's interesting. When we look at the PPI versus GPI, there actually are quite a lot of outliers. Well, outliers in the sense that for instance, if you look above the red line, yeah, Laos and Sierra Leone have relatively low levels of violence, but relatively high levels of peace, but low levels of institutional capacity. And what you see when you track it over time, or at least in the last 10 years, is those countries tend to go back towards the red line. So that's sort of what that shows there. So when you have that difference between, that sort of enforced peace and low capacity, that's just one observation. I think it requires a lot more research. When you look at the pillars, there are actually quite a lot of differences between pillars. So on page 83 of the report, you can see that some countries do very well in some areas and very badly in others. So there are some slight differences in terms of the pillars. So I'm not sure about Tony Mooney's work, but it would be interesting to certainly have a look at it. Maybe we can have a bit of a chat later on. Let's get a question from the very center here. Thank you very much. I'm Ed Elmendorf for World Bank Retiree. I inquire whether there might be some methodological bias in the report against large countries and countries that have particularly active international security engagements, including above all the United States, maybe the P5 in the UN Security Council and the like. And I wonder about the treatment of military expenditures internationally and particularly on peacekeeping, which might be considered a global public good, but then it's also a military expenditure, which may come out in a negative way in this analysis. Thank you. Thanks very much. Thanks, it's an important question. The militarization or the external indicators of the index have a lower weighting for one that they're weighted 40% as opposed to 60 for the internal. And the militarization indicators, they're really key ones. So for instance, if we're looking at the level of military expenditure, they're banded between countries that are extremely high and the norm. So the rationale is the United States, which spends about 4.6% of GDP on military spending, only scores about a 2 out of 5, 2.5 out of 5 on the military expenditure indicator. That's because country like North Korea, it's being compared to a country like North Korea, which is spending an enormous amount of its GDP on military expenditure. So when you actually look at the scores, it's not necessarily the case that those big countries get punished for their military expenditure. The other thing is UN peacekeeping is a positive indicator within the GPI. So if countries meet their UN peacekeeping commitments, they get a better score. So, and so we do try and account for that. What, step up to microphone, good. Hi, I'm Jamie Morgan with the Economist and Intelligence Unit. I would just also add to that, I don't know where the person is, so that's the question. We do within the armed services and several of the other military force indicators take it as a share of 100,000 people. So it is adjusted basically for the size of the population. And then on top of that, interestingly, this year was the first year since 1998 that the United States has dropped in military spending as a share of GDP and actually the overall global rise. Oh, sorry. The overall global rise in that indicator of military spending as a share of GDP actually comes from low and middle income countries that are spending a much larger share of their economy. Thanks, good question. Also in the middle here. Thank you. And my name's Angela Kirkman. I'm from Conservation International and from our newly formed Center for Environment and Peace. And so I'd like to pick on some of the comments we heard about the drivers of violence and conflict and the fact that investment in development may be a more effective way to improve security than spending on military measures. And I guess I would like to suggest sort of going one step further and saying that the investment needs to be in sustainable development and that sort of picks up on some of the millennium development goals. And I guess the question I had is about measures for environment and sustainable development actually in the scoring index. I had a quick look at this and I couldn't see anything explicit. So I'm just wondering if somebody can comment on the direct link of say the state and access to critical natural resources such as fresh water and how that could be addressed in the scoring index maybe going forward. Thanks for your question. In the positive peace index there are no metrics related to environmental sustainable development. One of the reasons is is because we empirically derived that with the GPI and there is not a strong empirical association when you compile the data that is available. And we have to bear in mind these exercises are conditioned by the data that's available and that's certainly something that there is the environmental sustainability index that Yale University does that tries to quantify these things but these efforts are few and far between and that's really one of the difficulties going forward. And certainly it's an issue that has been raised by the high level panel in the post 2015 process that this is something that needs to be better measured. So perhaps when we get those better measures we can better understand them. Again I'd like to invite those of you who are watching the live webcast to email your questions to rdlamb at csis.org. Question right here please. My name is Simin Wahdat and I'm working with Democracy International right now. So my question is how would you incorporate the tension around religious conflicts and especially the rise of radicalization in UK and US? So do you think these issues will impact the Millennium Development Goal in the future or do you have any remarks about that? Hi, that's a good question. So we actually have a terror activity indicator within the index which does draw upon and internationally respected. There's several but it draws upon one in particular terrorism database that incorporates into it not only acts of terror but also the as was mentioned earlier the number of fatalities and injuries and property and it does also weight through the measurement. It does make an effort to also account for the psychological impacts of terrorism. So within that respect it is accounted for but the larger question I think of religious based violence I'll kind of defer to other people who are involved in the construction and talk a bit about how that could be incorporated. No, thank you, Jamie. Yes, we do look at this in our global terrorism index and the data that that's based on is put together by the University of Maryland and they actually code terrorist incidents by their ideological objectives and religious terrorism is one of those things that they code. But I would say that this type of violence is manifested in many different ways and it's difficult to get a hold of it within the GPI but certainly I'd encourage you to look at the terrorism index that we put together to understand that. Okay, that's something Melanie. Within the MDG process at least in the discussions I've been having the issue of religious extremism isn't mentioned by itself but there are proxies for it. So it's looking at human rights, a full expression of religion and other personal beliefs and so with the hope that perhaps would keep people from becoming more extreme, looking at social cohesion and ways of bolstering that again to help bring people into the fold rather than driving them towards more extreme positions. So I think it's coming indirectly. Question up front here please. Hi, I'm Eli McCarthy with Georgetown University. Thank you very much for the report. The question is I guess about the positive peace index. To what extent were you able to look at restorative justice programs? I see the notion, the rule of law in the government indicator. Did you try to get into how much restorative justice is happening in court systems or schools in a particular state? And kind of related to that is this discussion about UN peacekeeping as a positive indicator. There's a pattern of sort of sexual assaults and rapes that have occurred in Congo, Haiti, et cetera by peacekeepers. So maybe you could say a little more the rationale of why that would be a positive indicator. Thanks. Thanks for your question. To the first part about restorative justice, no, we don't. And the reason is not because we don't want to, it's because there is not a data source that comprehensively measures that at a global level. The challenge of doing this when you're comparing nation states is you want to compare apples with apples. And I'd be interested in what Alejandro has to say about this just related to his rule of law work and he may have a better, I'd handle on the kinds of information that's available on that specific area. In terms of UN peacekeeping, it's a point well taken. One thing that we are important, what's important to notice that we don't count every UN peacekeeping mission. We only count the ones that are genuine peacekeeping missions. There's several ways of looking at this and I can show you the missions that we actually count afterwards if you want to get more detail. But it's not every single UN mission. Just very quickly just commenting on the restorative justice. There are basically almost no databases on that. What we have collected information from instance on the work of the civil justice systems around the world in about 100 countries, just measuring basically accessibility, efficiency, effectiveness, impartiality, but just on the degree of actually redressing the issues it's very complicated to measure actually that. We have even tried to measure the role of traditional justice in different countries. Even the goals of the justice systems around the world are very different. Not in all of them are necessarily redressing issues. So it's a very, very complicated issue. Sorry, just one other thing with the UN peacekeeping thing to note is that we are measuring financial commitments. So the idea behind it is the fact that it's the commitment of a nation state to the idea of UN peacekeeping. It's not directly related to whether or not X country supports X mission, although we do have that data and you can look at it. And clearly from projects like this are entirely dependent upon the availability and the quality of the data. And I suspect that if one could come up with an index of data quality and completeness, that there would be a pretty strong correlation between level of peacefulness and quality of institutions and the quality of data. And this is a fundamental challenge in everything. It's probably one of the main sources of the criticisms that you guys get on a regular basis every time you release a report. And it's a fundamental challenge in our entire field. The big part of the problem is that the data is available at the country year level, but fragile states, these are not coherent societies. They're in many cases, their borders are drawn by departing colonists and clumping together people who don't want to be together and dividing people who do. And as a consequence, you don't have uniformity within the country, much less access in conflict zones to really easily collect the data. And so it's a fundamental challenge that all of us in this field face is the quality and availability of data. Let's just take a couple of more questions and one final chance to the internet who's clearly slacking off here. R-D-L-A-M-B at CSIS.org. Let's take just, we'll take two final questions right here and then over there in the back. Hi, Cameron Creil with the Institute for Policy Studies. The report had briefly mentioned a prospective long-term project regarding the quantification of crime expenditure, which would use data derived from personal injury, property damage, and preventative measures like surveillance, insurance. And I was just wondering what the current status of that project is that something that's underway currently or something that's more of a goal for the future. And let's take the next, actually, while the microphone's going over there, it's probably a pretty quick question to answer. Yes, we are working on it. We're working on a project in Germany at the moment to try and count up the cost of violence containment expenditures there in a big European economy. And we hope to do this to many other countries so we can compare. Yeah, final question? Hi, Bernie Lee from Seton Hall University. I'm currently spending my summer with the Department of Commerce. It seems that in the Positive Peace Index, a number of the OECD countries were prevalent in that and that we, and when you look at a number of these other things, you can conflate it with a number of economic issues. And when we talked about there's very little correlation with ODA and peace, I was wondering, do we need to reframe the welfare issue? Because it seems that there might be a stigma in that foreign direct investment or these states coming in, putting in money, look at these states poorly, do not work towards putting the institutions into the people and maybe retraining the workforce and changing the culture in a way that allows them to accept a sort of development assistance in a way that they're allowed to, I suppose, keep a little bit of national pride and actually take ownership of the projects. What I'll ask is if whoever would like to respond to that, to respond to it, but then also just give some final thoughts on the basic question of so what? Given all of this, a lot of data, a lot of interesting trends, so what? Final thoughts and let's take it in reverse order, starting with Jamie and then moving down to Michelle if there's anything you'd like to add. Well, thank you. I guess in terms of so what, I'll just reiterate the call about data. A lot of, I manage several different indices at the EU and a lot of challenges we face is about data a lot of people often ask, well, why didn't you include this or that factor? And usually comes down to data management. It's not a very classy issue to fund at the Javam and Label, but it's really important. Melanie. And I would conclude by saying that too often people think that peace is a utopian venture that there's no way to measure progress. So why should we fund it? Why should we invest in it? And that the Global Peace Index and this is a search for data to help us measure our effectiveness is just crucial for a peace building to take hold and to be recognized as something concrete, effective, attainable, and something we can all aspire to. Thanks, Mike, final thoughts? More data do not always, and I say this as a long time veteran of the Budget Committee, more data do not ensure objectivity and accuracy when the criteria themselves are inherently subjective. I think so obviously the first thing when you come up with an index is countries are going to come up and say, okay, so what do we do? So obviously you must have a complete set of answers to that. And the second one obviously, the third part, the relationship between the Global Peace Index and the Positive Peace Index really is opening up Pandora's box. What you're doing is massive because the relationship between these two and just figuring out the relationship is a downed in task. So which I think it's great to provide a framework to start probably raising the questions because a lot of the different components in different countries may be different and so on. So I think it's great that you do it, but really it's an enormous task really to figure out the components and what works and what doesn't. And this question that we had from the beginning of development, what comes first, development, peacekeeping, peace, et cetera, these are very difficult questions in which obviously we don't have an aggregate answer. It's really just taking the pieces, taking it case by case, seeing what works in each case, and just taking these as a route, as a guiding map, but just to take that task. Yeah, I think I would emphasize that this is just a starting point in terms of the research and that's where the point about data is so important. We really can't improve on what we're doing until we get much better information. I think in terms of when we think about peace, the thing, so what that I really like to emphasize is the fact that violence and the absence of violence and peace is something that's relevant for all countries. It is a universal goal and that's why it's important that this has been recognized in the high level panel. It's something that it's very important in low income countries, middle income, and high income countries. So with that, I'd like to thank the panel as well for their comments and thank everyone for coming along. It's been a really great discussion. Michelle? Well, Daniel took my so what, but I'll just add to that because in my position, since I am working here in the US and I'm talking to a lot more groups who are working on various aspects of these issues, we have done a US peace index that looks at ranking states by internal indicators and it's just my experience and I'll offer these anecdotes that people who are working on the ground with issues of violence in their own communities have the same reactions to these tools as those who are working on global indicator development processes and we've seen a lot of similar drivers of violence and drivers of peace that have significant relationships both in the US and at the global level and there's also quite a fair amount of relevance whether we're talking about a homicide in Chicago or a homicide in Central America and the people who are working on that stuff every day do you have the same reaction and are looking for tools and metrics that can help further their cause. So my so what is that I'll take this opportunity to shill and say that we continue to drive down to the local level as much as we can given the data limitations that have been addressed. We are going to be doing a Mexico peace index soon and hopefully as we continue this work we'll have more answers. The connecting data and research to the policy world is what we do and our program I encourage you to visit c3.csis.org to see how we are trying to connect those issues. The global peace index, the positive peace index and the other work that's been presented today can be found at economicsandpeace.org and visionofhumanity.org. I encourage you to visit those as well. To those of you watching live by the internet thank you for watching and participating and to those of you who came today. Thanks for coming. I'd like to thank very much all of our panelists and particularly the Institute for Economics and Peace for coming here today.