Staff writer, with CNA
Taiwan ranked 42nd in terms of peacefulness among 163 countries, down five places from last year, according to this year’s Global Peace Index.With an overall score of 1.751, Taiwan dropped from 37th last year, the report published by the global Institute for Economics and Peace showed.The overall score measures a country’s level of peacefulness using 23 quantitative and qualitative indicators across three domains — ongoing domestic and international conflict, societal safety and security, and militarization.
A map shows Taiwan’s entry on the Institute for Economics and Peace’s Global Peace Index yesterday.
While Taiwan ranked 42nd worldwide, it was listed in ninth place among the 19 Asian-Pacific countries in the report, after New Zealand, Singapore, Japan, Malaysia, Australia, Timor-Leste, Mongolia and Vietnam.In a section that examined the use of artificial intelligence for and against peace, the report cited the nation’s vTaiwan initiative, which uses an open-source deliberation platform at the national level, as one of the few examples of “structured public deliberation producing direct policy change at scale.”
Across the world, peace is at its lowest level since the inception of the index in 2007, with 99 countries witnessing a deterioration in peacefulness and only 62 seeing an improvement, the report said.Global military expenditure reached a record US$2.9 trillion last year, while deaths from global conflict remained at historic highs, with more than 181,000 people killed last year, a six-fold increase since 2008, the report showed.Peacefulness deteriorated most sharply in the ongoing conflict domain but improved slightly in the safety and security and militarization domains, it said. Militarization improved mainly because of stronger commitments to UN peacekeeping operations, the report said.Iceland remained the most peaceful country in the world for the 19th consecutive year, with an overall score of 1.161, followed by New Zealand, Switzerland, Slovenia and Ireland, according to the report.Rounding out the top 10 were Austria, Portugal, Singapore, Finland and Japan, it showed.At the bottom of the list was Russia, with a score of 3.367, the report said.The Australia-based Institute for Economics and Peace is an independent, non-partisan, non-profit think tank dedicated to shifting the world’s focus to peace as a positive, achievable and tangible measure of human well-being and progress, the report said.
