We live in a time of war. And it is no coincidence that the main seats of power are occupied by strongmen. It is not only the most mediatised cases. The delirious declarations of Donald Trump on Greenland and Panama. The fury unleashed by Benjamin Netanyahu on Gaza. The delusion of omnipotence that pushed Vladimir Putin first to invade Ukraine and then to threaten continental and global peace.

The clearest snapshot of the situation is provided by the 2024 edition of the Global Peace Index (GPI), an instrument that has been monitoring the state of the world for 18 years. The GPI, created by the think tank Institute for Economics & Peace, issues a kind of report card on the ability of nations, regions and continents to maintain peace. The latest report warns us that we are standing on the edge of an abyss.

In Contemporary Conflicts, Civilians Account for 90% of the Victims

As Simonetta Gola, head of communications at the NGO Emergency, explains, “in contemporary conflicts civilians make up 90% of the victims. Every war consumes an enormous amount of resources that could otherwise be used to guarantee fundamental rights.” It is precisely from these two data points that the campaign R1PUD1A – REFUSE - was born, inspired by Article 11 of the Italian Constitution.

“In recent years – says Gola – those who tried to speak of peace have been treated as dreamers, if not as people acting in bad faith. But peace is not an individual ambition. The repudiation of war, and everything it always brings, is enshrined in the Italian Constitution.” More than 100 municipalities have already declared their intention to join the campaign. “We demand that Italy remain faithful to its Constitution, that it commit itself not to selling or supplying weapons, but to resolving conflicts.”

The Overall Picture According to the Global Peace Index

War does not arrive with statements and proclamations. It is a complex birth; the product of a long gestation whose stages are often unrecognisable. Looking only at the final outcome of the collective process we are building does not make a clear picture, but lining up all the elements reconstructs an unmistakable picture. The 2024 GPI has done just that, presenting it to institutions, academics, journalists, activists, communicators and civil society. “The world is at a crossroads. Without a concerted effort, there is a risk of an increase in larger conflicts,” it reads.

We reach 2025 breaking several records that, as a civilisation, we could well have done without. Since the Global Peace Index was created, militarisation trends had been consistently declining. They began to rise again last year in as many as 108 countries. 110 million people are displaced or refugees; 95 million are internally displaced because of violent conflicts.

How Many Conflicts, Large and Small, Around the World?

The number of large and small, potentially dangerous conflicts is the highest since the Second World War: 56. Competition between major powers is higher than ever; mid-level powers are growing and demanding centrality in their regions. The number of countries engaged in international conflicts has never been so high since the Index began, counting 92. The worst situation is in Sub-Saharan Africa, where deterioration has reached 134%; followed by South Asia and the MENA region (Middle East and North Africa).

Minor conflicts are increasing, raising the risk of escalation into major wars. Just look at recent history. In 2019, Ethiopia, Ukraine and Gaza were classified as minor conflicts. The picture is also worsening compared with earlier times. In the 1970s, 49% of conflicts ended in a decisive victory by one side, and 23% with a peace agreement. By 2010, those figures had dropped to 10% for the former and 4% for the latter.

How Much We Spend on Violence and How Much on Peace

In 2023, worldwide, violence cost more than $19 trillion in terms of purchasing power. To be clear, that is 13.5% of the world’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). It works out to $2,380 for every human being alive, from the slums of Mumbai to the penthouses overlooking Central Park in Manhattan. That is an enormous sum, and significantly higher than in previous years: an increase of $158 billion.

And what did we do with it? We lost it: these are the GDP losses suffered by individual countries because of conflicts. 74% of the global economic impact of violence is made up of military and internal security expenditure. In 2023 alone, military spending amounted to $8.4 trillion.

Wars and violent conflicts have crippled the GDP of many countries. In Palestine, war cut 63% from national GDP, in Israel 40%. In 2022, after Russia’s invasion, Ukraine lost 30% of its GDP; losses due to the civil war in Syria may reach 85%. Ukraine, together with Afghanistan and North Korea, ranked among the countries that in 2023 devoted the largest share of GDP to violence: respectively 68.6%, 53.2% and 41.6%. In Africa, Sudan lost 32.8% of its GDP, Timor Leste 21.3%, Angola 19.1%, Ethiopia 18.8%.

And how much have we spent on peace? Strikingly little: $49.6 billion, just 0.6% of what we invested in military spending.

The Most Peaceful Country Is Sri Lanka, the Least Peaceful Yemen

The Global Peace Index assigns each country a score based on 23 qualitative and quantitative indicators. The sectors analysed include social security, the extent of internal and international conflicts, and the degree of militarisation. From these calculations emerges the fact that the likelihood of a major conflict is the highest since the GPI was established. The numbers confirm it: the global average peace score fell by 0.56%. It may seem small, but it marks the sixteenth consecutive year of decline. Only 65 countries improved, while 97 deteriorated. 97 in a single year: never before had the number been so high.

The most peaceful country in the world is Sri Lanka, steadily at the top since 2008. In 2024, Ireland, Austria, New Zealand and Singapore also joined the leading group. At the bottom is Yemen, which dropped 24 places in 2024. Next come Sudan, South Sudan, Afghanistan and Ukraine. The invasion of Gaza had a significant impact: in terms of deterioration of internal peace, Israel ranks first in the world and Palestine fourth. Ecuador, Gabon and Haiti also recorded record declines.

There are some positive notes: in El Salvador, the fall in the homicide rate improved citizens’ perception of internal security. Positive results were also seen in the United Arab Emirates, Nicaragua and Greece. Europe is the most peaceful region in the world, home to eight of the top ten countries. Next come Asia-Pacific and North America, which, despite ranking third, is the region with the most severe deterioration. The least peaceful region remains the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

The United Nations Is Losing Its Role

The most significant deterioration in 2024 concerns indicators relating to the financing of UN peacekeeping missions, the percentage of GDP devoted to military spending, the number of external conflicts involving states and the number of deaths resulting from them.

On the loss of centrality of the UN, Simonetta Gola comments: “The United Nations was born from the vision of men and women who had experienced war first-hand. Many of them had fought it on the battlefield. Having seen the destructive power of atomic weapons, they understood the potential risks of any future war, and that is why, in the preamble to the UN Charter, they wrote of being determined to ‘save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.’”

That was sixty years ago, but what has been happening in recent months, especially in Gaza, seems to threaten the intentions of those countries that, for the sake of peace, were willing for six decades to limit their own sovereignty. “Today the bodies that were supposed to be the promoters and guarantors of that new world order still exist – explains Gola – but they have been progressively delegitimised by some of the very countries that founded them. This is not just about a few current leaders, but about a worldview based on inequality that many countries have practised for the past 70 years.”

The Global Peace Index Reveals the Devastating Human Costs of Conflict

In the past 15 years, the number of deaths due to conflicts has increased by 482%. Refugees and internally displaced persons, GDP losses and the spread of terrorism have all risen by at least 100%. The past sixteen years have seen a progressive worsening of the world’s wars. The average score of countries has declined by 4.5%. The Global Peace Index analyses the performance of 163 states: 95 have worsened, 66 improved, and 2 remained unchanged. Between 2008 and 2023, only 7 of the 23 global indicators improved; the other 17 showed general declines. The only significant achievement we were making was a global reduction in militarisation: a consistent trend from 2008 to 2019, but one that has reversed over the past four years.

In 2022, we reached the highest number of battle deaths in thirty years; 2023 gave us a clear vision of how war is changing. Modern wars have devastating human costs. The first two years of the Russia-Ukraine war killed two thousand people per month, and no one seems truly interested in changing the situation. It is difficult to quantify the precise number of deaths in Gaza: Israel’s fury has destroyed much of the infrastructure and institutional bodies needed to keep count. Estimates vary, coming from different sources, but never below 35,000. The Global Peace Index defines both conflicts as “forever wars.” Wars in which violence is so prolonged that no solution seems possible. Wars in which the situation can only worsen due to external military support, disproportionate forces on the ground, and the geopolitical rivalries involved.

How War Is Changing in the 21st Century

This is also a period when war is changing form. Two factors weigh most: military technologies on the one hand, and geopolitical competition on the other. A vast number of non-state groups now have access to technologies such as drones and improvised explosive devices. Since 2018 in particular, the use of drones has increased by 1,000%. Just think of how Ukraine held off Russia’s feared artillery using FPV drones. This figure is also revealing for another reason: it is true that the number of military personnel has decreased in 112 countries, but military technologies have simultaneously advanced considerably. A hi-tech war needs fewer and fewer men on the ground.

This year, the indicators of states’ military capability take into account factors previously ignored: technological differences between conflict actors; mobilised military resources; battlefield experience; combat readiness; use of fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft, ships, armoured vehicles. As a result, the ranking changes. Even though US military capability is three times greater than China’s, the latter is the country that has most increased its global position; followed by France and Russia, both slightly down. According to the new indicators, global military capability has increased by 10% over the past decade.

Geopolitics also makes conflicts harder to manage. We had become used to a “simple” world in which a single power – the United States – held sway. That is no longer the case. The United States, like Europe, long maintained balance in their own regions, under the illusion that this was equivalent to maintaining it globally. The rise of actors like China and Russia, or of regional powers consolidating their influence, changes everything.

The Power of Civil Society and the Example of Emergency

Faced with the scenarios described, it may seem that there is no possibility of improving the situation or containing the disaster. It is not the first time in history this has happened, and this in itself teaches us that there is always an alternative. Almost always, it has been built from the mobilisation of civil society, willing to respond massively to calls against war. For Gola too, the role of citizens is fundamental. “Emergency, like many other organisations or individuals, continues to promote an alternative practice to war. In our case – she explains – we treat victims and work to spread a culture of human rights which, as our founder Gino Strada used to say, are the only antidote to war.”

“Today we work in some of the world’s main conflicts: in Gaza, in Ukraine and in Sudan, a country experiencing the world’s worst humanitarian crisis with 12 million refugees and displaced people, yet absent from our media,” she recounts. “When the poet Quasimodo wrote ‘you are still the one with the sling, man of my time’, he was saying exactly this: we have made unimaginable progress in science, technology, medicine, but we are still stuck with violence as the only solution in human relations. That is why – she concludes – it is necessary to continue to pay attention to what happens in the world and to try to change the things around us.”

See, Il numero di conflitti nel mondo è il più alto dalla Seconda guerra mondiale