Denmark is the second most peaceful country in the world, just behind Iceland – the same as in 2015.
The 2016 Global Peace Index (GPI) shows the two countries are holding steady in the top spots, as they have done over the past few years. The GPI measures the state of peace in 162 countries according to their “absence of violence and absence of the fear of violence”.
The scores for a large number of indicators are normalised on a scale of 1-5 and then combined into groupings. Denmark scored just 1.3 out of 5 in the ‘Militarisation’ and ‘Society and Security’ categories.
The country scored an even lower 1.1 for the ‘Domestic and International Conflict’ category, although it managed 2.4 in the ‘External Conflicts Fought’, the highest sub-score Denmark received in this year’s index.
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Measuring the impact
The report is released every year in June and provides an analysis of the data, identifying peace trends over time, as well as the key drivers of peace and an economic calculation of the impact of violence on the global economy.
The 162 countries included in the GPI encompass more than 99 percent of the world’s population.
The included countries either have a population of more than one million or a land area greater than 20,000 square kilometres.
