The Most and Least Peaceful Countries for Each Region

The Global Peace Index, a scoring system adopted by the Institute for Economics and Peace, identifies and measures 23 different metrics that drive peace in a country. They divide the world into 9 regions and this chart maps the most and least peaceful country for each region in 2024.

Europe and the Middle East have the extremes of the world: Iceland is most peaceful at 1.11 while Yemen is least peaceful at 3.40. The rest of the scales chart the extremes for each region relative to these countries. A lower number is more peaceful in this scoring system which starts at 1 and can go as high as 5.

The factors measured include military expenditure, weapons imports and exports, political terror scale, deaths from internal and external conflict, nuclear and heavy weapons, perceptions of criminality, homicide rate, political instability, violent crime, and demonstrations, among others.

Note that according to their system, North America has only two countries, the US and Canada.