MEASURING PEACE IN A COMPLEX WORLD2017Quantifying Peace and its BenefitsThe Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) is an independent, non-partisan, non-profit think tank dedicated to shifting the worlds focus to peace as a positive, achievable, and tangible measure of human well-being and progress.IEP achieves its goals by developing new conceptual frameworks to define peacefulness; providing metrics for measuring peace; and uncovering the relationships between business, peace and prosperity as well as promoting a better understanding of the cultural, economic and political factors that create peace.IEP is headquartered in Sydney, with offices in New York, The Hague, Mexico City, Brussels and Harare. It works with a wide range of partners internationally and collaborates with intergovernmental organisations on measuring and communicating the economic value of peace.It works with a wide range of partners internationally and collaborates with intergovernmental organisations on measuring and communicating the economic value of peace.For more information visit economicsandpeaceEXECUTIVE SUMMARY 2RESULTS AND FINDINGS 7Highlights 8 2017 Global Peace Index rankings 10 Regional overview 14 Risers and fallers 21 GPI domain indeed, no region improved this year although a number of them maintained stable scores. One positive development was that the indicators measuring number of deaths from internal conflict and number deaths from external conflict both improved. However, the main positive contribution to the category was the reduction in the number, duration and role in external conflicts which had the added benefit of being broad-based: all regions improved-particularly North America as a result of a winding-down of US military operations abroad in the later years of the Obama administration. In contrast, the score for Societal Safety and Security made a modest improvement overall, with the main gains materialising in South America, and Russia and The overall score for the 2017 Global Peace Index (GPI) improved slightly this year due to gains in six of the nine geographical regions represented. This is the first improvement in global peacefulness recorded since 2014 and does not necessarily indicate a new trend. Of significance is the number of countries that improved, 93, compared to those that deteriorated, 68.8