21 Jun 2018

The 2018 Global Peace Index (GPI) has once more ranked Botswana as one of the world’s most peaceful countries.

The Botswana Government Communication and Information Services (BGCIS) says the recently released index has ranked Botswana in position 29 out of 163 countries.

“This continues to place Botswana above over half of the European region countries surveyed as well as all five of the Permanent Members of the United Nations Security Council (i.e. UK (57), France (61), China (112), USA (121), and Russia (154)).

On the African continent, Botswana remains in second place behind Mauritius (20),” BGCIS deputy permanent secretary, Dr Jeff Ramsay explained in a statement on Wednesday.

Dr Ramsay said Botswana was one of only five countries which achieved a perfect score in the domestic and international conflict domain.

He said the other four countries were Brazil, Chile, Mauritius and Uruguay.

“The index is composed of 23 qualitative and quantitative indicators from highly respected sources and ranks 163 independent states, covering 99.7 per cent of the world’s population. It gauges global peace using three broad domains: the level of safety and security in society, the extent of domestic and international conflict and the degree of militarisation,” he explained.

He said Iceland was once again ranked as the world’s most peaceful nation this year followed by New Zealand, Austria, Portugal and Denmark.

Dr Ramsay added that Syria was listed as the world’s least peaceful country followed from the bottom by Afghanistan, South Sudan, Iraq and Somalia.

He said the Global Peace Index is maintained by the Institute for Economics and Peace, which 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.   ENDS