 If I could have your attention, why don't we go ahead and get started. My name is Linda Jamison and I'm the Dean of the Abshire Inamori Leadership Academy here at CSIS. It's my pleasure to welcome all of you here to what I think is going to be a very innovative and exciting discussion about peace. I see a lot of friends and some former colleagues in the audience and I just would like to welcome you back to CSIS. Last year you saw my colleague Rick Barton up here and I'm following in his good shoes, thank you Rick, as a new member of the GPI expert panel and it's in that capacity and also my capacity at CSIS that I talked to you today. As most of you know, this is the third year of the GPI. The GPI is the world's only index to rank countries according to their relative states of peace. My colleagues up here on the dais will speak more specifically about the GPI and I will introduce them more specifically or they will be introduced more specifically later in the program. But I do believe you have some of their bios in your program. We have with us Andrew Williamson who is at the end of the table and Andrew is the global director of research from the Economist Intelligence Unit's office in London. He's going to be fielding questions on technical aspects and maybe some points of clarity of the study. Next is Leo Abrutzi who is the editorial director of the Economist Intelligence Unit here in North America but also for the entire Americas. Leo is the methodology man and so the questions that you have for him that have to do with methodology I know that he is happy to answer those and welcome to CSIS, both of you. Next is Clyde McConaughey, Clyde is the president of the Global Peace Index and Clyde's role today is to introduce this to you and talk generally about the rankings and the index and Clyde I just want to briefly say that I'm so happy to see that the US is up from its former ranking of 97th to 83th which is good news but a higher ranking would be much better news I think for those of us in the audience. My next is Mrs. Harriet Fulbright who is joining us today and I'm going to be introducing her more specifically in a couple of minutes but first I'd like to take this opportunity to provide some brief comments about why I became involved in the GPI. As someone who's spent a lot of time scrutinizing political leadership and political leaders and training rising young leaders what provoked me to join in the expert panel of the GPI was this one question, if we demand competent and creative leadership in times of war shouldn't we also demand the same character of leadership to achieve peacefulness as we all know this is a country that knows a lot about war especially recently but we know far too little about peace how to grow it organically how to incite it in others mine it in ourselves and manage it in our own cities and our own neighborhoods. The Global Peace Index is an instrument of power precisely because it provides us with a much more fluid understanding of the conditions of peace and the intrinsic role that peacefulness has not just for those of us in this room that are interested in peace but for those at all levels of society who need to be engaged in this dialogue, leaders that are already holding office but those that are coming to power those that are rising up that have an interest in engaging society in more peaceful pursuits. Now it's my honor to introduce our first speaker Harriet Fulbright. Mrs. Fulbright is best known for her passionate commitment and her lifelong journey to the promotion of nonviolent means to resolve conflict through international cooperation and educational pursuits. We all know that Fulbright legacy is very strong in this country and we're all well aware of it but it's also strong overseas. The Fulbright's have advanced the cause of peace for over 50 years. They've brought students here they have sent students overseas to take part in their program and it's a tribute to her and her late husband that this is such an enduring legacy here in the U.S. Mrs. Fulbright is a tireless advocate for the improvement of the human condition throughout the world through mutual understanding and peacemaking. She has spent her adult life in the fields of education and the arts. She also speaks. She's a tireless advocate for peace. She supports the causes that she embodies and it's such an honor to have her at CSIS today. And Mrs. Fulbright thank you so much for being with us and so much that you've given to your country and in my country and given to others so thank you and I join my colleagues in welcoming you to the microphone. Thank you very very much I'm really delighted to be here. Three years ago when the first global peace index was announced it was a landmark occasion. For the first time peace was examined as more than a concept an idea to be discussed and pursued. For the first time it was measured in all of its aspects defined by indicators and drivers which were given differing weighted importance and countries all around the world were graded on the basis of their standing in each of these indicators and drivers and then ranked from 1 to this year 144. That alone was a tremendous value to the world. A clear statistically valid method of measuring peacefulness according to well defined and concrete indicators. Now in the third year the global peace index is able to reveal not only each country's standing but the beginning of trends the progress of a country or lack thereof the structural drivers as well as the attitudinal drivers of peace. Slowly the attitudes of the citizens of a peaceful country are emerging as powerful forces in this whole enterprise. All in all it becomes clear then that the maintenance of peace in any country is the responsibility of all its citizens. Surely with the growing body of information coming from the global peace index our work toward peace may not be easier but its direction will be clearer. The maintenance of peace requires all citizens to take responsibility to participate fully whether it be volunteering at their children's schools keeping up with the news and making their views known being a good neighbor and or a good business person obeying the laws of the land or working to change those laws that are unacceptable and always working for ways to avoid open conflict. The Fulbright Center and in partnership with the Alliance for Peace Building has decided that it is therefore time now that we have this information to heighten the awareness around the world of this information by putting together a conference in the fall the global symposium of peaceful nations. The two organizations are inviting the first and second most peaceful countries from nine regions around the world to a conference to discuss their peacefulness how they arrive there how they intend to maintain it and how they hope to help their neighbors raise their level of peacefulness. This will take place in November and we are working hard already to make sure that it is the best possible use of their time and the information that we have gathered. I would just like to end with a statement of Senator Fulbright who as you well know spent his life in a struggle towards peace towards getting his country to understand the nature of peacefulness and to improve peace through international education exchange. A nation's security depends on its overall position in the world on its political and economic strength as well as its military power on its diplomacy and foreign trade its alliances and associations and on the character and quality of its internal life. Security in short is not merely a military and technological commodity but a combination of many elements all of which must be taken into account in the shaping of national policy. The uncritical acceptance of simple equation between security and armaments can only lead us into an accelerating arms race mounting international tension and diminishing security. In our quest for world peace the alteration of attitudes is no less important and perhaps more important than the resolution of issues. It is in the minds of men after all that wars are spawned. To act upon the human mind regardless of the issue or the occasion for doing so is to act upon the source of conflict and the potential source of redemption and reconciliation. I thank you very much all of you for coming to this conference for your support and for your ongoing efforts. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, Clyde McConaughey of the Global Peace Index. Ambassadors, consular representatives, distinguished guests. Thank you very much. I always think it's a good sign when one makes a change to one's presentation based on the previous speaker which I've just done and I'll tell you what that point was when I get to it. But what that shows is that peace indeed is an evolving dynamic thing. It's not a static thing and I think the Global Peace Index this year illustrates as you're about to find out that in difficult times peace is also a fluid concept and a fluid element that we need to measure. I'd also like to make particular welcome to Chick Danbark from the Alliance of Peacebuilding and indeed Harriet from the Fulbright Centre because they've supported us very much in the last two or three years as we have endeavoured to bring to the world a measure of peacefulness and the drivers of peace. I'd also like to mention and thank Rick Barton and Linda indeed for their support in the last couple of years as well. The insights that I'm going to announce today are unique, they are new and they are different. I think they bring the study of peace to a different level. Now that's somewhat of a bold claim and I think it's fair to say that we welcome a critical evaluation of the work that we do. The whole idea is indeed to increase the debate and the discussion and the resources around peace. So what I'll be focusing on today is the work that we've done around the Global Peace Index as much as the Global Peace Index itself. Indeed Leo will be making a presentation on the specifics of some of the results and the methodology. The GPI was really designed to be a bold initiative. We believe it has strong conceptual as well as statistical integrity and I think that's been borne out in the last six to nine months when we made the core database available to several statisticians with PhDs and professors etc to try and dissect it to try and find out what we could learn more about peace and I think we've done that. And we will continue to do that because peace is an issue that demands ongoing attention and that's really part of our motivation. I think it's important for those of you that have not come here before or listened to the last couple of years or indeed heard of the Global Peace Index before that you understand it was an initiative of a man called Steve Killalay with whom I work. Steve is an international technology entrepreneur, very successful man, floated companies that end up on NASDAQ as well as the Australian Stock Exchange but lately in the last few years he's dedicated most of his time, effort and money to philanthropy and he was travelling through Africa over the well has done so many, many times looking at the work that he's foundation does in terms of the poorest of the poor in the world and he wondered why some countries that had been to before were then in violence and those that were in violence were then at peace and that led him to think well what are the most peaceful countries of the world. He was unable to find it mainly because it didn't exist and then he commissioned the work of the Global Peace Index about three years ago. As Harriet said it started off at 120 countries now, it's 144 countries and it has 22,000 data points in the model now so it's starting to get to a size that can be used. I might also take this opportunity to mention a couple of our other initiatives and this is where Harriet's introduction made me think. Firstly is the Institute for Economics and Peace which is indeed identified on the documents that you have and indeed in the presentation as well which is an institute that we're founding or have founded now to focus on the linkages between economics, peace and business. A second initiative we have is a documentary film that we've just released. We have an LA based global agent called Soldiers of Peace and that's aimed as one might expect it shall we say the consumer markets so bringing the sorts of peace and reconciliation to the broader public and the third which I only thought of when Harriet mentioned it was peace education today. In fact just about three hours ago we released on the web on the Institute for Economics and Peace website or economicsandpeace.org a peace education syllabus which is a four stage syllabus which we're releasing around the world to bring it to primary and secondary schools, primarily secondary schools but certainly not tertiary, we're aiming at a much younger audience. So while of this we fundamentally believe that to have a more peaceful world gives us the foundation in which to address the major issues facing humanity. So whether it be climate change, overpopulation, decreasing biodiversity, degradation of the water table, all of these sorts of issues would be more effectively addressed if we had the foundation of a more peaceful world. That's why we do what we do. So effectively we're saying that peace is the prerequisite for survival in the 21st century as we know it. So let's have a look at some of the findings. I have about a dozen slides. The first is in some ways a summary of the major points that I've actually just made. It's the last point. It's this investigation of the texture, what we call the texture of peace, drivers, indicators that we think starts to add value for others who work with the work that we do in order for them to understand peace better. This is the one slide that people often want to see. Certainly in terms of the world media they're very interested in what countries come at the top. And that is the top 10 nations on the Global Peace Index this year. New Zealand has come up an extra couple of paces and taken shall we say first spot which is excellent because it gives an excellent example for other nations to follow. Although indeed the top 10 nations or I would argue even the top 10 percent of nations, so the top 14 nations are equal in terms of their representation of how countries can be run in order to address difficult issues no doubt but nonetheless show the way for other countries as to how they can become more peaceful. So Denmark and Norway in fact came in equal second. Iceland fell a couple of spots. It was actually first last year as some of you may know and this year it has fallen to fourth. That is a result of the difficulties that it has faced indeed as many nations have faced the issues that it has faced in terms of the tough economic times and indeed they had levels of violence and demonstration which they have not previously had nonetheless on the positive side and we always try and face look at the positive on the positive side they put in place several initiatives. They introduced a new party which took eight percent of the vote in the first election. They applied for membership of the EU. They sought to introduce the euro as their currency and very quickly they went from a position of great difficulty to a response which indeed has them fall down the index but nonetheless maintain a very strong position. The other notable is Slovenia coming in effectively at equal eighth ninth or tenth position which is the first central or Eastern European nation that's come into the top 10 of the GPI since its inception. I'll next show you the United States. The United States is ranked 83rd and it had a score of about 2.015. For those that don't know it ranks between either 1 to 5. It's also worth noting that countries at the bottom have scores of around 3.5 so things could get considerably worse if we allow them to do so. The whole idea of the global peace index of course is that we don't. So the US has ranked 83rd with a score of 2.015 and it improved about six places and there was one particular indicator each of them are weighted differently that contributed to that improvement and that was the consideration which the EU can address later but which we and the expert panel felt collectively that the likelihood of terrorist attacks is lower, was lower in the last year than it was previously and that in itself pushed the US further up the global peace index. So that was a good finding. Also other countries went down around it so it managed to maintain its position, its indicator scores and other countries fell past. Most of the other indicators remained the same. It also moved up what we call a quintile so that a 20% listing from the second to the bottom two around the middle. I'd also like to highlight the top five rises. So these are the countries that have moved the most on the previous year. Bosnia and Herzegovina moved 23 places up the index. Angola, 16 places. It's a credit to Angola because it's the first country that has consistently improved in the top five year on year since the GPI was started. If they managed to keep that up next year then they'll be heading towards the top which is an incredible achievement when you think of the difficulties that they faced perhaps around a decade ago. So 16 places that improved and you can read the rest of Republic of Congo about 15, Egypt around 13 and Trinidad and Tobago around 11. All of the other aspects of the GPI in terms of specific results I'm going to lead to Leo because I'm mindful that I want to speak to you only about 10 minutes more and it's the work that we're doing around the GPI that is actually some of the more interesting findings this year. So last year I outlined to you that we had established that there was a strong relationship between per capita income and the global peace index in terms of correlations. Also that consumer markets can increase as peace increases which we dug into a lot more this year. Further the correlations were set up with other indexes such as the Human Development Index and the Business Competitiveness Index from the World Bank and the World Economic Forum and that provided us an a stab basis for comparison and thirdly or fourthly indeed last year we sought to define the peace industry and it's on that work that we do did considerably more work this year. Generally I don't like too many words on slides but I have to say I'm breaking my own role this year because there's a lot to communicate. Each one of these slides has about a 40 page document behind it so it's quite a summary. The next three slides are a little bit more detail on this slide. So we're going to detail the statistical analysis that uncovers the drivers of peace and the drivers of violence which are in your pack and highlighting that peace is a leading indicator of wealth creation. Secondly we'll talk about correlations with attitudinal studies and I'll explain who did that research and what was actually found. So we really went out to the people of the world through surveys that established were already established in the world to ask what the people from the most peaceful nations and indeed from some that are the less peaceful nations thought about various aspects the economy or religion or whatever the case may be and we correlated those and we'll show those to you this afternoon. And finally we had a report commissioned by the Economists for Peace and Security in the States in the United States of America which did a lot of preliminary research but highly valuable research on the economic value added of peace or a lack of violence. So the next three slides cover those. What we found we looked at the GPI the global PCNX completely differently in the last six to nine months. So the GPI has all of the indicators it has the drivers that we've explained before. It has an internal and external evaluation of the peacefulness of a nation and all of those you might say are in vertical silos. What we did this year is we commissioned a couple of PhD or a professor and a doctor at the University of Sydney to look at it horizontally. In other words to look at all the data that exists in the model and try and find themes or factors factor analysis that run through the global peace index that are statistically strong but are also somewhat independent of each other. So that we can start to see what actually moves a country to become peaceful. And what we identified is three factors. Those are social what we call social and political peace. Secondly is demilitarization and thirdly national security. Now I unfortunately don't seek to try and summarize what goes into each one of those factors. They're all in the packs that you've got there in that document called peace its causes and economic value. Suffice to say that that is a completely different look at the GPI than just a ranking of countries. As I say it's a horizontal evaluation of it and stands up to rigorous evaluation by statisticians externally. So the first one measures a degree to which nonviolent conflict can be resolved within a country. The second deals with troop deployments and casualties. What we would say is more the traditional measure of peace or violence and the third is the capacity of a country for violence and perhaps more importantly the resources opportunity cost. The opportunity cost of having resources deployed in those sorts of activities as opposed to others and it's on that that the economists of peace and security did further work. To move on the drivers we did a lot of work which sought to establish what the real drivers of peace were in the model that we'd created and these six points of all of the drivers that we looked at looked at were found to be the strongest actually in priority order in terms of impact. So well functioning government was by far the strongest driver of peacefulness in a nation and those that were less peaceful. It's important to understand it's a combination of these it's not just one or the other one has to have a sequence of these. Freedom of the press was very very strong driver extent of regional integration life expectancy higher participation rates in primary schooling very very strong and women in parliament that's the first time that that particular variable has come up it wasn't highly correlated in the global peace index but when we looked at it in a different way and looked at it with the combination of variables women in parliament came up as one of the top six drivers of more peaceful notions. We also identified for negative drivers or you could say drivers of violence but I'd say probably negative drivers and they're listed in the pack I don't have a slide on them but they're listed in there and it's important to understand that those drivers are such as in fact one of them was even GDP per capita that's not to suggest that GDP per capita in fact is a negative driver of peace what those four negative drivers were in the absence of these six factors then these other drivers would create more violent situations so it's a balance you can't have GDP growth without this sort of combination of factors otherwise it creates problems electoral process was another one electoral process it wasn't necessarily enough to be a democracy it would have to be a democracy that has well-functioning government freedom of the press extent of regional integration so just having free and democratic elections was not enough for a country in fact take without these factors it could become a driver of violence secondly of the three sides that I was going to talk about is social attitudes of peace and we did some work excuse me with the program on international policy attitudes PIPA and PIPA kindly took the global peace index and looked at a number of the different sources that they have on global attitudes amongst people and consumers they included the BBC surveys world value surveys, Pew surveys and various others Gallup was another and world public opinion so basically they took the global peace index and looked at what do people the general public think about the characteristics of various factors and I'll list what those factors are there and how does that relate to their position in the global peace index so what this is basically saying is that the countries that are characterized as more peaceful in the global peace index have people that generally think these points they generally think that their culture is not superior to others they generally think that there's a high place a high value placed on tolerance they also generally think no matter which country it's from that military action should be limited and internationally sanctioned furthermore leaders who seek conciliation within their society and internationally is a positive improvement and indeed women and men make equally good leaders they believe in free speech and a respect for human rights and the highest correlation of all was that people of the world when they're evaluating which countries are making a positive or negative contribution to the world tend to be very highly correlated with peacefulness they include peacefulness in that evaluation and that was actually the strongest finding that we found with the social attitudes of peace finally and then after this I have a couple of more slides and then I'll finish up this one slide is an attempt to summarize a 70 page document which is then summarized into a six page document within the discussion paper into one PowerPoint slide so I'll endeavor to summarize what this says we were interested in crunchy numbers so the global peace index has sought to establish a measure and an evaluation of peace but what we often got in the particularly in the last year was so what what's the economic benefit of peace and also what are you recommending in terms of policy initiatives so the last two slides the next two policy initiatives that could be sought by governments and others so what this is basically saying is that the value to the world the economic impact on a cessation of violence was estimated by this eminent group of individuals who worked on it who I should point out were Dr John Teppermalan and Dr Jürgen Brower who did the work for us that the economic impact of a cessation of violence would be around 7.2 trillion dollars now we've probably had more expressions of the word trillion in the last six months than probably in the history of the world and I'm happy to say that we can add to it so what that was basic that number is made up of two things around 2.4 trillion is made of economic activity that would be redeployed to activities in the world that are based more around peace which is about 96% of global GDP so a redeployment officer that would be more obvious things like military hardware manufacturing etc but also industries that are more marginally related to the existence of violence so that could be political analysts it could be the manufacture of gas masks it could be security guards and dogs and grills so 2.4 trillion is the amount of money has estimated that would move would shift about 4% of the global GDP towards another application of activity what's called static peace and we went further down we then split that up into with the economists of peace and security into whether it would benefit agriculture whether it would benefit professional services or whether it would benefit industry and it was estimated that about 1 trillion would benefit industry of that figure and about 1.4 trillion would benefit services agriculture was actually neutral in the sense that it's actually a non-violent it sometimes creates violence but it's a non-violent industry as such and so it got no particular economic benefit furthermore another 4.8 trillion and this is very very interesting would be generated as estimated through business activity that would otherwise not happen at all in other words with people not having to worry about security so much and not having to worry about whether or not their business activity is going to be attacked or broken into or various other things we would we could seek to generate about 4.8 trillion or another 9% of economic activity in the world so then we broke that down and as I say in one slide I'll do what I can to summarize it but we broke that down to every country of the world what would be who would be the beneficiaries and what figure would that be and that's all in the documents that you've got there as to whether or not that benefit internally within their economy or with international trade so the US for example would benefit out of that 4.8 trillion by about 1.14 trillion dollars which then would be further broken down into about 578 billion through additional trade this is per annum and based on figures up to the end of 2007 because that's the early 2008 that's the latest data available and 563 billion further trade with international community so those numbers are legitimate they are able to be interrogated but they are also very very large and really put paid to the argument that I sometimes hear that war or violence is good for the economy well when 96% of it is based on the peace side of the economy I don't think that argument really stands up anymore at the risk of going too far I'd say that we even went down to the level of different industries within the US so the wholesale trade which makes up about 5.8% of US GDP would benefit about 67 billion dollars taking it from about 805 billion to 870 billion dollars as an industry in the US all based on the sensation of violence finally the last two slides policy recommendations we did feel this year that with the combination of the work that had been done primarily externally certainly for the Global Peace Index itself with the Economist Intelligence Unit helped us calculate and collate the data but also with the work of PEPA and the work of the Economist of Peace and Security and the work of the professors at the University of Sydney that we had five areas that we could start to make specific policy recommendations so what do they include NGOs and governments should be should include building peace capabilities into their development programs because they have a data-rich source now to enable them to do that universities and governments should fund chairs or departments which are based around economics and peace and to my knowledge there is no Department of Economics and Peace in any university in the world today business associations should work together because we've got some numbers which now have specific relevance to specific industries on the economic impact of violence either in a country or with external relations but they could work together to include these sorts of data in their investment evaluations in their capital risk models in their executive risk models and indeed with as a whole sector and then in discussion with government the last two governments need to meet their agreed overseas development assistant targets the reason that we make that recommendation is because we have seen in the last year that a degradation of the economic situation and the financial turmoil does indeed lead to difficulties and violence within the world and that's why the Global Peace Index is not a measure that just measures the absence of war it measures the absence of violence so ODAs are in fact very important for countries as difficult as it might be at the moment to continue to pay and finally governments need to improve the national accounts so you could go through the national accounts of a country and identify those industries and sectors that are related to or would benefit from a more peaceful situation final slide where is the Institute for Economics and Peace going? Well the GPI is now integrated into the Institute for Economics and Peace we'll keep developing and publishing the GPI into the future we have a multi-year contract to do that now so it's not going away we should we will continue to research the publication of business and peace we will continue to research the causes of peace and we will develop the educational material such as I introduced a little bit earlier for primary secondary and tertiary schools and we will continue to make policy recommendations thank you very much excuse me for a moment while I fiddle with this thank you very much Clyde thank you all for joining us this afternoon my name is Leo Abruzzi I'm the editorial director for the Economist Intelligence Unit just to explain for a moment who we are you're all familiar I'm sure with the Economist magazine we are a branch of the same company of the Economist Group but unlike the magazine which focuses on on very very good journalism we focus more on in-depth economic and political and business research so we're going a bit more in-depth and focusing on topics that are of very great interest institutions to governments to countries and to businesses as well we were asked about three years ago just under three years ago by Steve Killilay from Australia and from Clyde as well to help them construct an index and this was a tall order an index that tried to measure relative states of peace in the world and then beyond that actually tried to rank countries on the basis of how peaceful they are we've ranked many things over the years but ranking countries on the basis of peace was a new challenge so given the inherent controversy in that and the fact that everyone will have a different point of view on which countries are peaceful and which ones are not what I'd like to do today is take you through the process that we use because you will have questions on why certain countries as Clyde just showed why certain countries finished at the top why some finished at the bottom some of those are fairly obvious but countries in the middle you can make arguments foreign against exactly where they're positioned so we'd like to spend a few minutes explaining exactly how we did this essentially to walk you through the methodology now as a starting point three things to mention at the front especially since we're in a very political town three things we focused on as we were putting together the methodology for this index first we were as objective as we could possibly be we gathered the best data that we could find and we let the data tell the story so we go into this with no preconceived notion no idea of trying to push one country near the top or one country near the bottom we went to the best data sources we could find whether they were from the World Bank the UN from any organization that we thought had a trusted credible reliable data source and we accumulated the data we scored it and we ranked it second point is we tried to validate the process by not just relying on our own judgment we put together with help from Clyde and Steve a panel basically a peer panel of peace experts largely academics and authors who've worked in this area for decades and we use this peer panel to essentially validate the choices that were made so when we looked at a particular group of indicators these were debated over the course of weeks and months to make sure we chose a set of indicators that had a good level of acceptance among the people who were on the peer panel so we think that gives this a level of rigor and validation and the final point is you have packets on your chairs if you have some time and you're interested look at a report in that packet called methodology where we explain in detail the sources that we used how we scored the countries and how they were ranked everything is laid out we're trying to make this as transparent as possible no mystery to this at all so if you're interested in more detail and I'm going to try to move through things fairly quickly so we can move on to some questions but if you're really interested in probing this in detail take a look at the report hopefully it should make things very transparent and help to explain exactly how we went through the process but with that said let me just take a few minutes and explain broadly what we did and how we did it as clive mentioned earlier we've looked at 144 countries we've increased the number of countries each year this is the third year that we've done this there are more than 144 countries in the world but to some extent we're limited by data availability we try to find the best possible data and we were able to find good reliable data we're able to make good estimates for about 144 countries so that's four more than we did last year we chose 23 indicators in order to score and create this index and we'll talk a bit about those indicators but what we mean by that is everything from for example the number of soldiers who may be dying in war to the number of people who are incarcerated in a country's prisons to levels of political instability within a country so we chose a set of indicators that we thought spoke in one fashion or another to the level of peacefulness or the relative states of peace in a country and finally and this is perhaps the most interesting part of this is once you've ranked these countries the logical question is why is it that certain countries finish as they do so we then took a series of potential determinants or drivers or causes or things that might lead to peace everything from democratic government to level of education to wealth levels and we essentially ran correlations or looked for relationships between these drivers and how countries scored on the index and we turned up some interesting results Clyde shared a few of those with you a few moments ago but we'll talk about them in a little bit more detail now this is as the name suggests a global peace index so as you can see there virtually every region of the world is represented and represented quite heavily including Sub-Saharan Africa we did add a couple of new countries this year for to be specific so Nepal was added for the first time this year Burundi Montenegro and a couple of others so we are working if you don't see your country there hopefully it will be next year as long as we can find good reliable data we're adding countries to the index because part of this process is to try to encourage policy reform in these countries as well so the more countries we can include over time the better now the process and the methodology the process is complicated but I'll just take you through the basics I mentioned that we had 23 indicators that we looked at these were basically divided into quantitative or largely numerical indicators and then qualitative ones so ones that involve more judgments by individuals so by the quantitative indicators as the example I gave you before you can count the number of people who are dying in a war that's a quantitative indicator you can count levels of weapons that are being exported or imported into a country so we used a certain number of quantitative indicators and again in those cases we gathered this information from the best sources we could find we made sure the information was reliable but one thing about quantitative indicators is they can't capture everything there are clearly judgments that people can make for example political stability there's no way you can really find a specific indicator that measures political stability you need up to a point human judgment on that the Economist Intelligence Unit has a large number of country analysts what we do is track countries so we have analysts who cover literally every country in the world from the smallest countries in sub-Saharan Africa right up to the United States so in addition to the quantitative indicators we also created some qualitative indicators looking at things like levels of political stability and we asked our analysts to score those on a one to five scale so the model consists of both hard indicators and what we would call more judgmental indicators but the judgments in all cases being made by people on our team who do nothing but evaluate these countries on a regular basis and again these indicators were then validated and approved by an external panel just to keep us honest and to make sure that we had good level of acceptance among people who are specialists in peace and in geopolitics the sources that we use for the quantitative indicators World Bank, IMF, UN various peace organizations we use the best sources we could find for this in most cases organizations that have been doing this for years and have established a very good track record for the way they're collecting data the second major step is then we created an index where we took all of these scores we normalized and essentially put them all on an even basis so that you can count them and correlate them on a standard basis and then we weighted them because in any index as you can imagine not all 23 of those indicators you may feel are equally important so again using the peer panel we weighted these indicators and then produced the index off the back of that the final step as I mentioned was then to look for causes for why certain countries finished as well as they did so looking for determinants or drivers of peace so that was the process what you can see here in one very nice very colorful chart is really a snapshot of how countries fared the easiest way to look at this if you can't quite read the legend is anything in blue the darker the blue the better but anything in blue is a country that scored fairly well on the index or very well so countries that essentially have high levels of peace so you can see that if you look at western europe there's a very high concentration in western europe perhaps not surprising including scandinavian countries countries in the european union but you can also see that canada and australia in particular score very well so very high levels of peace in those countries generally the redder the countries get the less peaceful they are so you can see again not surprisingly especially in central africa where there have been insurrections and civil wars going on for a long period of time levels of peace there are much lower and basically the yellow and the beige colors in the middle are countries that are somewhere in the middle you can see essentially that's where the united states is as linda mentioned perhaps further down on the index than we would like but looking at the data collecting it as objectively as we could that's where the us fell and that in fact is where all the countries fell now what conclusion overall we we've processed tens of thousands of numbers and we've done this over a period of time so what was the conclusion perhaps surprisingly we felt that overall the world was somewhat less peaceful last year than it was in 2007 now again we're releasing the 2009 index but we're looking principally at conditions in 2008 so overall the world was on balance less peaceful so why there are specific incidents you can point to the invasion of georgia by russia last year was obviously a major event but even more interesting than that if you consider what happened last year if you remember during the early part of the year when commodities prices were soaring there were food riots in many countries very violent demonstrations as people just really had trouble affording basic staples so interestingly an economic cause produced some of the lack of peace or some of the instability early in the year and then later in the year no surprise after september 15th when the economy really globally started to head down he began to see more turmoil in countries at that point a number of governments have fallen because of the credit crunch and because of the economic crisis that we've had so interestingly one of the reasons apart from invasions apart from the normal regrettably normal conflicts that we see among countries is that there was a heavy economic dimension to the instability in the world last year largely arising from either the recession or causes that produced the recession now as kai showed you earlier this is just a quick list of the countries that did best on the index you can see certain general trends there as i mentioned the majority of these countries are either scandinavian or northern european countries but there are some exceptions new zealand finished first on the list japan is also finishing in the top 10 as well and again in most cases and we'll talk about this later what do these countries tend to have in common what are some of the drivers generally high levels of income high levels of education usually countries with well-established well-functioning governments if you look at the other end of the spectrum these are the countries that finished at the bottom so the bottom 10 on the index again some of these you would expect to see there iraq and afghanistan obviously these countries have had wars underway for some time if you're in a state of war you will not fare well in the global peace index some other countries like somalia essentially failed states haven't had a sustainable government for a long time it's always interesting to see israel on the list but there are specific reasons for that israel technically is still in a state of war with many of its neighbors and israel also has a very high level of militarization in this particular index high levels of military spending as a share of gdp will cause you to be marked down on the index an important point here is with with all of these rankings we are not and this is important to emphasize making value judgments here we're not necessarily saying that where countries finish is necessarily a cause of a particular policy agenda that they're following countries follow whichever policies they feel are best in some cases obviously there's room for improvement in other cases it's up to parties like you and everyone on the outside to make judgments on where these countries finish from our standpoint we collected the data and this is where the country is finished and again we can talk in a little bit more detail about why that is interesting to look since we've done this over three years now of which countries improve the most and which fail the most over time this is one good advantage to doing an index like this over time because you can actually see some temporal trends bosnia had the biggest improvement in the index there were a couple of reasons for that bosnia as you can imagine has continued to make a considerable stride since the war ended in 1995 in particular what helped bosnia in this case is that the number of displaced persons which is one of the indicators that we looked at was reduced last year so by having fewer displaced people that caused us to move a bosnia up in the index angola as clad mentioned is a good story angola was in civil war for a long period of time but angola has made all things considered a strikingly strong recovery elections in angola last year not perfect by any means but nonetheless the political stability in the country has improved considerably i won't go through all of them one thing to mention to you is if you look at the methodology document in your packs there is a write-up on each of these countries so you can explore in a bit more detail why these countries went up in the index and why they improved as much as they did likewise if you have countries that go up you also have countries that go down and the country that fell the most in the index was madagascar maybe not a country that we follow that much here but if again if you do look at developments madagascar has had an extreme amount of political turmoil over the last year the president of the country was forced out several months ago some considerable violence in the country as well so it fell 30 places in the index lafya is an interesting story clad mentioned that briefly but this goes back to the point mentioned earlier about how the economic developments last year played into the index lafya not that long ago would have been considered a star in eastern europe but the country was heavily in debt and as a result of that and part of the crisis in the banking system the country experienced severe economic turmoil last year the government eventually fell and as a result of that the instability the political instability the violence and the demonstrations pushed lafya down on the list by about 16 places again there are write-ups and explanations in more detail in your pack so please have a look at those when you have some time later today the interesting part of this process is not just to rank the countries ranking them as interesting and it provides a good relative positioning on where countries fair but we also tried to look at correlations that is we looked at indicators beyond the 23 that went into the index and tried to understand which additional indicators which drivers which determinants which causes seem to correlate very well or which seem to have a strong relationship with how countries fair in the index so these are some of the things we looked at it's always interesting to ask whether or not democratic countries are more peaceful so we looked at various measures of democracy and tried to correlate that we also looked at the strength of institutions international openness regional integration education and so on so we ran correlations with all of these measures against the outcome of the global peace index to see if we could determine what the drivers were and the results are you can see here what's most interesting is that the best correlation the strongest not cause necessarily but the strongest correlation for global peace were those countries that had the least level of corruption there was a correlation there of almost point eight so countries that are corrupt tend to be countries that are less at peace some of the other drivers that we identified were not just democratic governments per se but well functioning democratic governments that does make a difference also number of years of schooling so countries that tend to be better educated also countries with higher levels of per capita GDP that is to say higher levels of income also generally correlated very well so again these are correlations not cause and effects but as Clyde mentioned other economic organizations are now looking into this in more detail and trying to draw tighter relationships between these drivers which we've identified in the actual causes of peace just to give you some idea we like scatter plots and charts at the EIU so I'm going to torture you with just a couple of these but just to give you an idea of how the relationships worked if you look across the top you're looking at a measure of corruption so on the far left the ones in the twos indicate countries that have the highest level of corruption going out to the far right with countries with the least level of corruption and you can see there that there's a fairly nice curve that moves from lower left to top right which just shows that the countries with the highest level of corruption also had the worst score on the peace index and as you move out towards the right the countries with the least level of corruption had the highest scores on the index so you can see there's quite a nice correlation there and we did the same thing as well with functioning governments we used a qualitative indicator to try to judge how well a government is functioning and again you can see a fairly nice consistent move from lower left to top right indicating the countries that had the least well functioning governments fared poorest in the index up to countries that had the best functioning governments and had the best scores in the peace index so I'm just going to wrap up and give some final overviews so which countries tend to be most peaceful? generally speaking small politically democratic politically stable countries tend to do best that partly explains why Scandinavian countries are there why New Zealand is at the top of the index Norwegian countries excuse me Nordic countries in particular tend to do well it's uh there's only one Norwegian country as far as I know but also as we mentioned earlier countries with good levels of education countries with a high per capita GDP tend to fare well in the index as well what we're going to do now and what Clyde and Steve Killillay have done is to take this beyond correlations and to actually try to dig down more deeply into the causes of peace again in your package you'll see a report from the Institute for Economics and Peace where they have gone into much more detail trying to quantify economically the benefits of peace and so what we have tried to do through this index is to set a foundation and then to use that foundation as an opportunity to explore these issues in more detail we've been at this three years the new results that Clyde produced now we think take this further than it's been before and with a commitment to do more research on this hopefully we'll be back here next year and be able to draw some tighter links and tighter relationships between peace and its drivers with that I'm going to wrap it up thank you very much and we'll be happy to take some questions thank you to Leo and Clyde and Harriet for I think what is a you've got the the breath and the depth of of a very fascinating project and we would like to go ahead and take some questions and if you could identify yourself when you stand up we I think we have some microphones and tell us where you're from and also tell us who you want to field your question who wants the first hi Bridget Moykes with the Friends Committee on National Legislation thanks so much for your work in this presentation I'm not sure who this goes to perhaps to Leo but anyone may want to weigh in my question has to do with the relationship between peace and conflict and I guess environment and natural resource management this is an increasingly recognized area where either environmental pressures from climate change and whatnot are drivers of conflict or the management or mismanagement of natural resources being used in conflicts is increasingly being recognized so I'm just wondering how that comes into the analysis and the research if it's something that has been part of it I didn't notice any types of factors related to environment in what you presented but perhaps there's a deeper discussion there that isn't in these general slides well I'll just mention that as a start we do not have an environmental indicator in the index right now we've considered a whole range of indicators and I'm going to let my colleague Andrew Williamson who did a tremendous amount of work building it to comment on that but I want to also let Clyde comment because I know in past years we've tried to draw connections between the environment but for this one specifically in speaking with the peer panel at least at this stage we didn't see a strong enough connection to include it as one of the principal drivers for the most part right now we were looking at measures of internal and external peace it's probably something that we should consider looking at we've had other suggestions in the past that perhaps we should be looking also at violence against women for example which is another interesting point that we're going to consider including at some stage but I'm going to let Andrew who was very much involved in selecting the indicator just offer some thoughts on if we would consider doing that or how that factored into the process with the peer panel Yes, thank you Leo When we originally worked to think about constructing the Global Peace Index we really looked through lots of definitions of how to define peace and this is explained in detail in our methodology report but essentially we hit upon an agreement with the peace experts on this measure of negative peace so really what we're trying to measure is this absence of violence in society we thought that was a very clear and defined way of measuring this so we really stuck to indicators that lend themselves to that sort of measurement that's not to say that other measures and other measures of positive peace don't include resourcing and sustainability issues actually in the first year the Institute of Economics and Peace and the vision of humanity team did in their report look at these issues in fact last year the EIU tried to assemble a number of indicators on environmental distress we were quite surprised at how difficult it was to get that type of information data across the number of countries that we're looking at so we haven't done that this year because we're a bit worried about the concerns about data and it's a vigor and robustness we did though find last year that things like access to clean water did seem to have a very strong correlation with the GPI and also demographic pressures so the rate of growth and the projected rate of growth of population also seemed to have that kind of nice correlation and fit across the countries in the GPI Hi, my name is Gary Pickers I'm a recent graduate from the Masters Department International Peace and Conflict Resolution here at American University also deeply involved in media being a record producer I'm wondering did you do any research into media in different countries as far as quantity of violence as shown in media whether radio, television, internet mood, basically the climate that the media portrays in individual countries because I feel that that's a strong factor and I couldn't really find that anywhere in your list and I'm wondering did you look at it and not find enough variants from country to country or how you guys considered that within the study Yes and no is the answer We are in discussions with a professor at the University of Sydney who is a global expert in this area and have been in discussions with him for about nine months I think Leo hit the nail on the head even with the environment side and I beg your pardon All right, is that a little bit better? Yes So getting back to the definition we had to define something that we could measure otherwise it wouldn't be a global peace index and that was the absence of violence so environmental issues as Leo said was in fact I can't tell you how much of a core foundation that is given that Steve is one of the funders of most water wells in Africa than probably anybody else around so he's got that very much to heart in terms of the media it's the same we being in absence of violence that doesn't naturally fit into the indicators of the global peace index but it certainly fits into the indicators and I'll probably query you a little bit Freedom of the Press is firstly included as a driver and as in the correlation table was calculated for us by the EIU and secondly was identified very highly as a driver of peace, a cause of peace now Freedom of the Press is not the same as violence in media I'm fully aware of that but it's also a step along the way so I think watch this space is probably the best summary I could give you this lady in the front row here yes, yes ma'am um thank you my name is Maya Colbert and I'm from the Sayodara Forre Coalition and I'm actually a peace studies major undergrad at Goucher College and the question I had for you is what do you believe can be what I mean what do you believe social unrest and protests how's that kind of an indication or a signifier of some sort of violence going on or something that can indicate non-peace in a country or in a region well in our in our index certainly demonstrations violent demonstrations that is one of the 23 indicators that we do have in the index so certainly when there are demonstrations when there's political instability in a country that does tend to mark the country down on the index so we we do include almost by definition protests social unrest as as being factors that are the opposite of peace so I think the answer to the question is it is included in the index we do consider social protests demonstrations especially if they're violent to be negative elements in the index should we take maybe two or three questions at a time and you can address them and more holistic just go ahead and pass the microphone to their Ed has a question and then Owen I'm Ed Elmendorf from the UN Association in the World Bank I guess my question goes for Leo or Andrew I had a sense that in the presentation you slipped a little bit black back and forth between correlation and causality and I'd like to pursue that one further particularly around the drivers of peace and offer a hypothesis that the direction of causality maybe the reverse of what is implied by what you're suggesting namely that peace might lead to some of these other conditions that you're describing and I think these things merit further exploration perhaps with longer time series data we might be able to get into different kinds of models in exploring that thank you thanks Ed and we have a question here hi my name is Michael Maseba I'm the founder of goodness500.org a social enterprise that ranks the S&P 500 based on corporate responsibility my question to you is how large a role do you think corporations can play in fostering peace throughout the world well I think we'll take the first one and Andrew I know Andrew and I were actually discussing this question of which comes first so I'm going to let Andrew address that and I think Clyde is well positioned to take the second one yeah that's an excellent question we've been discussing that for three years quite simply you know I think what we really tried to do here from the start was that peace is something that is so discussed and commented on but it was very difficult to measure and I think that's what we really tried to do with the GPI we tried to measure an absence of peace and so that's our output variable if you like if we could quantify peace and the absence of violence across countries that then allows people not just us to look at the potential determinants and causes and really the analysis that the EU did was to try and start that discussion so we're you know we are essentially economists so we're very understanding of this issue of correlation doesn't mean causality but essentially you know within the first few years we've said that we've produced this output variable but we want to know what the determinants of peace are as well so that's why we've gone away with our team to produce you know 33 indicators that are classic kind of socio-demographic economic variables those relating to health education and just show that you know if you just take the correlations and plot these for some of them there is this interesting relationship and it's really from there that we wanted everyone else to pursue the research and I think this year certainly the Institute of Economics and Peace have taken that much further they are now starting to look at a very stunted time series but there are suggestions that you know certainly with the economic recession and downturn that these linkages are kind of holding up over time and I think you know this year the Institute of Economics and Peace has really made an excellent start getting in lots of different economists and researchers to utilise the GPI and really start doing the number crunching to truly try and tease out what these drivers are so essentially that is the big question you know what is it is it an improvement in development education that creates peace or does peace drive these situations these variables and I think you know over time certainly we'd hope that we'd get a much better answer to that I might just add that indeed it is the first year that we've attempted to put specific data like this together I think it would be fair to say that we believe that having a more peaceful situation will enable businesses to thrive entrepreneurs to innovate scientists to do research and create a more peaceful environment but the chicken or egg story is is one that we've only just touched on this year for the first time now that we had three years of data suffice to say that we do think we've stepped a lot further down than we were perhaps last year in terms of causality so we'll endeavour to work on that further in the next six months question about corporate social responsibility or corporate responsibility as to what companies can do that's really my background I'm not an academic or a diplomat government official business person so there's quite a lot having worked with multinational companies all over the world and lived in China, Germany, the UK Australia all over the world business can do a lot more than it's doing now that's for sure so what could a business do what could certain businesses that are in the media at the moment do with something like this they can actually incorporate these sort of data sets into their investment evaluation executive risk evaluation overseas expansion plans and make investment decisions based on corporate risk models various other things capital risk models for that matter so the the GPI and its associated driver set does now create an opportunity for boards and I sit on about six boards of companies publicly listed and other around the world can use these data sets to in fact evaluate better business decisions that have peace or its ancillary benefits as part of their evaluation process and I could see how that could happen next month what I further think is that groups of businesses so normally we call them competitors but at times when particular industry sectors have collective interests then competitors get together and they we have started to identify and it's a little bit related to the to the last question we've started to identify that in fact there are many industries that thrive in peaceful environments in fact the majority of businesses thrive in peaceful environments retail clearly tourism obviously commercial aviation clearly insurance finance so there might be some aspects of some of those industries that have associated military or or even violent beneficiaries as well but nonetheless as a whole those industry associations sectors could group together and make and this is the third point discussions and input with government lobbying government and having governments and politicians then consider the implications of some of the actions that are sometimes taken when there's violence prevalent and I'm not necessarily talking about war I'm talking about social domestic by domestic I mean within a suburb not necessarily within the home so I think there's a lot that business can do both in their own business as a sector or an association and then with government Faisen Ilich I'm with the World Policy Institute I just want to follow up on the media and I think one problem is that we're dealing with a vicious cycle and to break the cycle and deal with the with the entrenched interests that have very powerful lobbying as well as advertising and institutional institutionalized you need you need to think beyond this because you have just just the U.S. military spends about neighborhood of four billion dollars on advertising and the problem is that you're dealing with real existing interests in terms of expenditure versus potential interest it's very hard to build a lobbying around potential future interest and you can have lobbying that is very focused around narrow interest overwhelmed and undermine the greater good so the question is how do you break out of this let's take Zoe you've got a question right behind you Lewis oh okay Hi there Owen Sanderson CSIS I was wondering how you manage the outliers these black swans for instance if you look on the the plot graphs you see Israel and Russia are in the corner a lot of the times how do you manage these numbers and integrate them into the rest of your data thank you so I'll take the first and you can take the second institutional support advertising budgets you've got to start somewhere the I'm very familiar with those there's industries I'm certainly not familiar with how to create lobby groups and it's certainly outside the bounds of the Institute at this stage to create lobby groups but if you move 10 ranks up the GPI average GDP per head raises $3,100 to be more specific the average spend on food and non-alcoholic beverages goes up by about $132 ahead the average spend on telecommunications goes up $42 US dollars ahead the average spend on leisure goes up $144 ahead now in those three examples that I've given I could probably name 20 companies off the top of my head in several sectors that are specifically interested in improving their bottom line and their top line and GDP growth is one of the measures that of course major multinational companies use to determine whether or not they're going to go into a market and they made those decisions myself in the past so the reality is is those industries probably have not been approached and certainly have not had the data the UN Global Compact did a survey last year and for those of you that don't know the UN Global Compact is the linkage between the United Nations and the business community and I believe it's made up of about 5000 multinational companies around the world of which I sit on one of the boards of one of those members and that did a survey last year amongst business people and they were they basically said 80% of the respondents of senior business people around the world said that they believed that their markets would improve in a state of less violence 79% said that their costs would reduce in the state of less violence but only 13% said that they knew of any source of information that could actually give them the wherewithal to make better decisions based on violence or peace within markets that they're operating or thinking of operating in so that was hard numbers by highly reputable individuals in large multinational companies so in order to create a lobby situation if that's the aim it really has to be taken on the first step which industry has to understand what role it can play and is prepared to play in order to take those next steps answering the outlier question on the outliers well the as Leo mentioned in the methodology report we're very transparent about how we've measured each indicator and variable across all the countries essentially all countries are measured and on the quantitative indicators and variables we've banded the data so countries get a score based on where they fit on that range so those outliers are suitably penalized if they are significantly away from the most of the group of countries or the mean and the median of the data set interestingly across the the GPI the bottom 30 countries actually make up more than 50% of the entire range of countries so you know most countries that score well that are peaceful tend to be very similar they're tightly bunched it's the countries under distress that you see this this much larger range in terms of outliers right here Lewis Rasmussen with ARD I'd like to simply say thank you I think this is very interesting and makes a valuable contribution the question I have comes from a comment you made about the well-functioning government being a very strong indicator and that you defined that subjectively I'd be interested in knowing how you define it and then since it is a subjective measure to what degree do you look at well-functioning governance at the subnational level another question Rick Barton from CSIS it seems as if I'd like you to speak to the the bias against larger states of the of the 25 top rated countries ironically the only two large states that are in that 25 are Japan and Germany and whether there's whether there needs to be kind of a a full-scale knocking down of kind of the practices of larger states and whether maybe some of the responsibilities that they've taken on for regional issues and end up having a negative effect as well but one of the things that I noticed and when I work in large states is that the they have everything so they they tend to have almost anything that you're looking for exists in a larger state so the complexity of the society right off might lead to some kind of a bias but I just I'm just curious about your your findings maybe I'll take Rick's question first there's no question that a large state especially like the United States which provides a security umbrella for large portions of the world is going to pay something of a penalty in this index there's the old expression sort of pox americana which one would argue puts a burden on the United States if that's the right word for it to maintain high levels of defense spending so I think it is right to say that if a country has taken on a broad level of geopolitical responsibilities as the United States has which will tend to require high levels of defense spending then yes up to a point the United States will pay some penalty for that and that's why we said earlier we were we were anxious especially at the EIU not to draw value judgments here because one could argue that there's a good case for the United States playing that role of global policemen but you are right to say that by and large large countries do have a wider range of issues and opportunities and therefore don't fall into that category of small states that perhaps can afford to focus on a more limited range of issues Japan and Germany are obviously not small countries but it is interesting that those are the two countries that emerge from the second world war and that have had largely pacifist philosophies over the last 40 or 50 years so the two countries that you chose are perhaps unique countries but by and large I think it's fair to say that large countries that are trying to do a lot have perhaps say a tougher road to hoe in order to score very well in this index I think that's probably fair the well functioning government question it's um well I'll take a quick crack at that and then pass it on to Andrew it is a qualitative question there's no doubt about that economists generally hate qualitative questions because it relies on the judgments of some individuals what I would say is the economist intelligence unit has about 120 full time country analysts by and large each of them is only focusing on a couple of countries so we have for example one person all she does is follow the Czech republic in Hungary that's all she does so we put a lot of confidence in our analysts to know what's happening in those countries now because a question like well functioning government or political instability is is judgmental when we create these questions we have guidance that goes along with each of these questions so when we have 120 people looking at a question like what is a well functioning government mean we don't allow them to use their own imagination on that we will have guidance and we will say a well functioning government is one for example that tends to have well defined transitions so that as in this country when January 20th comes around the old guy leaves and the new guy comes in so we do have a series of guidelines that we spell out and we ask each one of the analysts to look at this series of guidance these guidelines and to evaluate their country in that context so that doesn't mean that the question is not qualitative but what it does mean is hopefully the 120 people who are doing this are all thinking about it in a common way thinking of that Andrew not really it's a very good answer no just to add that yes where we can't measure things because we just can't get the published data we can't do the primary research we do results to that kind of scoring but this is something that you know we do on a daily basis we really do know our countries and and where possible we will test this against data that does exist for certain countries and it's not just live subjectively for our analysts all these scores are then discussed internally within the region the regional director would look at this and then a central global team will just look at all these scores and data to make sure that it all makes sense not not for that indicator that's actually from something that we call the political democracy index and that's very much focused on central government so national government two more yeah a couple here Susan Griffin with national council for the social studies very pleased to have this information and interested to see that you've put together some educational materials I wonder what kind of a plan you have for disseminating the information to educators and the next question a lot of problems yes I ask one of the positive recommendations was to for the government to meet their grid levels of overseas development assistance to avoid crises in the violence I do think that that this indicator is somewhat places politicized because of the money that goes to the other countries coming from the more developed countries can actually lead to more violence through corruption so how do you look at those linkages thanks with regards to the education material Zoe I'm going to hand it to you very quickly so you've got about 60 seconds to think about the answer we are endeavoring and in fact I would happily openly say any ideas and support are gratefully accepted what I should do is go back a step we realized after last year well in fact if we go right back to the beginning having children more certainly the designers of beneficiary of the GPI and having them more or better educated on these sorts of issues at a relatively young age we think would be a good thing so that was two or three years ago in the last six months we've worked quite hard under the specific guidance of an educational curriculum expert rather than ourselves to develop a four module education program which Zoe can make a comment on which we've finished only about two months ago it will be available in electronic form but it includes things like that simple map which you know I've presented to nine year old primary school classes and they get it I get blue I get red and I get the bits in between so it is very very important for us the that educational module has just been put on the web today and Zoe will give you the details in a second and we are seeking to engage with educational or educationalists and educational institutions around the world but Zoe you could make a comment on the US sure I actually get to use the microphone that I'm holding the educational materials are as Clyde mentioned in four modules they start with the module on measuring piece and investigating piece on a personal community and national level they talk about peace and sustainability peace and business and I'm blanking on the fourth at the moment but it will come to me in a moment peace and education peace and education there we go and what we have what I have done in terms of especially distributing these materials in the United States is get in touch with a number of educational networks networks of teachers as well as social studies networks on a state and national level the National Peace Corps Association actually told me today that they will be also putting it out to their vast network of return peace corps volunteers for our teachers and so working in partnership with all these associations within the United States in particular and then rolling it out nationally is what we'll be doing and I've also been arranging to meet personally with these networks to get it into the hands of educators and the ODA question and the ODA Yes, if I think I understood your question correctly you were asking why was Clyde for example suggesting that countries make their commitments their development assistance commitments when they're there's certainly a likelihood that that money could be stolen or could be diverted for corrupt purposes two comments on that one as we mentioned earlier corruption is about the worst possible thing you can have when you're judging peace the correlation between corrupt governments and lack of peace was the highest of any that we that we encountered so if your question is if countries make if richer countries OECD countries make their development assistance commitments isn't just going to be stolen well it's possibility it certainly has been plenty of times in the past but what we would say is there's been a fairly concerted effort I think by individual bilateral donors and I think also within the world bank a very very heavy effort over the last five or ten years to try to to fight corruption and I think that you're finding and people might disagree with this but I think it is true to say that the level of accountability that generally comes with development assistance and with loans whether it's from bilateral countries or from the multilaterals level of accountability I think is higher now that it's been in the past so while it might be easy to say well just don't provide the assistance and all that won't be stolen I think that's probably not not the best option the best option is to try to increase the levels of accountability to try to target the money as much as possible away from individuals and corrupt governments and try to get it to the ground as much as possible I'll just add one more point there from personal experience whilst I'm involved in many commercial enterprises I also sit on the board as a board advisor to a foundation which has about nine figures in its capital portfolio to help the world and so on a monthly basis every single month I and other colleagues are making decisions on funds that we know will inevitably end up in somebody's pocket but we give away these millions every year to the poorest of the poor in the world in order to assist knowing that that's the case so I get back to the point that was you have to start somewhere and and we make our criteria of evaluation we expect that there's some commissions that need to be paid or will be paid in order for money to get to those that need it but nonetheless it's for the benefit of those people so we continue on thank you can we take maybe two last questions I think we have one here and then one right behind you Monica please Jonas Klaas from US Institute of Peace I had a question regarding the factors that were used as correlations with with peace and it was mentioned regional integration I was wondering whether this included all types of regional integration economic politically but also security and then a second small one which says relates to the factors the indicators for peace I see a lot of structural factors and is there also room for to measure the role of individuals maybe stay elites populists politicians the rhetoric they use can make a big change perhaps so is there any way you think that this could be included who has the last question here yes please my name is Alfred Faruja I happen to be from one of the countries that is not listed yet hopefully it will be retired diplomat from Malta and to have two questions I understand that you have mentioned internally displaced people how about the outflow of refugees and as I love seekers and my second question is how do you see this index being used so that those who are at the bottom of the list could be helped to move upwards thank you thank you well do you want to Andrew just address address the question about regional integration and what we're including there yes the regional integration is another one of these the qualitative indicators primarily it focuses on essentially trade economic ties within a region so again you know all these the the the scoring mechanism for these has a lot of detail for our analysts and the example that's used of very strong regional integration is the European Union so it focuses on trade it does focus on other political issues it doesn't focus so much on on regional security integration so really it's about trading political integration perhaps I'll address the the rhetoric of of peace that also strikes at one of the absolute hearts of perhaps the unseen side of what the global peace index is interested in as well so sustainability being one and the words that we use the in fact the the comment the questionnaire about media as well and the words that are used in the media in fact the words we use in everyday speech and often are around have a a violence or a war metaphor for them you know targeting this and penetrating that and etc now I must hasten to add that you know in business and indeed in society we've got no problem with the competition and even conflict what this is about is violent conflict and there's a big difference so created friction competition and all of that is fine what's that got to do with rhetoric we are very mindful and I find myself picking myself up all the time using what are sometimes violent metaphors to discuss things in everyday life so it's a very big issue and now we're seeking to consider that certainly do we think it's important in the media that we're always or often focusing on that sort of rhetoric we do think it's important it's certainly outside the bounds of the the GPI as it exists at the moment it's probably going to be an area of interest and then again tied in with the media and indeed how politicians speak for the institute in as time comes I might just continue just on I think I'll leave the EIU to comment on asylum seekers and how they're accountable suffice to say that displace people are but how do countries move up the list I'm particularly interested in in addressing that the reason that we're structured it the way we have is so that a country should it be interested and many do countries governments do contact us now maybe not after the first year and more after the second and hopefully more after the third with specific comments and some of the ones at the top say what are we doing right and I mean if you go through each one of those individual indicators and think of now some of the policy recommendations that we're that we're saying people should consider then I think it is increasingly possible for a country to think of specific regional perhaps military certainly educational areas of policy that would seek to improve their position but the important where there is seek to improve their position it's important that a business or indeed a government does want to I mean not that the GPI is the beyond and or by any means but it does provide a measure and indeed the reason it's structured as a table an index a league table whatever you want to call it is because it is our nature human nature to want to move to the top of these things and long may it be so that people strive to get to the top of the global peace index so I think that those different constituents I'm talking about academics governments business philanthropists NGOs all do take into account the things that are measured and then think what could we do and indeed what could I do tomorrow in fact what could I do in this afternoon and what about that fence dispute that I've had with my neighbour for the last two years and I don't mean to belittle it I mean we are trying to start macro and end up macro any refugee question yes well one of the indicators that that's including the GPIs is this measure of of refugees we clearly in the initial discussions and with the peace experts recognise that a country couldn't be considered to have an absence of violence if it had a large number of its people seeking refugee status beyond its borders in terms of asylum seekers well that isn't something that was initially discussed as something that is this measure of an absence of violence just because people coming into your country that's essentially the inflow from another country so per se you didn't see that as a absence of violence for that country it's more the ones that are leaving the country in terms of seeking refugee status but then on this last issue of how the GPI can help those countries at the bottom of the list well I think that goes back to this initial point and discussion that what we try to do here was to create this output variable that others can use for their own research and investigation so at least here there's this quantifiable value for peace for a country and I think ultimately what you'd want to arrive at is much more vigorous study and research and mathematical study about which of these potential determinants are not just correlated but are causal I think we've made that initial step certainly looks like economic development well functioning government not just democracy per se in time you'd hope that you would be able to not just have the GPI as a measure that you'd have these other variables that are very important along the lines of health indicators and education and government and income equality and this would serve as an early warning indicator that you could see that where these variables start to fall that there's a strong likelihood that the country is under distress and there's a high chance that violence is going to occur in that country so I think ultimately that's what we're trying to do with this is it's for other researchers and for ourselves to use this data and this score to really try and track down what the influences are and allow people to study countries set up tables and have this as an early warning indicator for countries that are getting into problems well we have unfortunately run out of time but I'd like to turn to my colleagues to see if there are any final brief comments about the questions about some of your conclusions no? I pretty much covered it well and I would just like to say that this has been a fascinating conversation and I'm glad that you are all here to join us today I also will say that this is a relatively new ground for CSIS and I'm proud that this institution would take the step and sponsor co-sponsor this event I would also like to challenge all of you to help push this notion and help push the index into the mainstream of foreign policy discussions as we all know it's not and I would I would probably guess that there's not one member of Congress or Senate that has been briefed on this or that would understand this in the way that we've talked about it today and that seems like as far as the U.S. is concerned a very great hill to climb but I know that we're all together in that and the more that we push this concept and notion into the mainstream the more that it's embraced by the foreign policy and national security community I'd like to say there are two congressmen who have been briefed on this That's good, there's great news I've done it I'll pop the hill Probably thanks to Harriet there are two members can you tell us who they are? Yes one of them is Senator Luger and the other one is Congressman John Lewis and they were both very interested in fact Congressman John Lewis was trying to figure out how to coordinate something up on the hill to reinforce this particular event I think events overtook them and they couldn't do it but I know they will be commenting on it Well good this sounds like two very good champions Congressman Honder as well is also brief Great That's wonderful Well three down and several hundred to go Anyway thank you so much for being here today