Global Peace at Historic Low as Conflicts, Deaths Surge, IEP Report Warns

In June 2026, the Institute for Economics and Peace released its annual assessment of global stability, and the findings were stark: the world had reached its most fractured state since the index began tracking conditions in 2007. Across 163 countries, the measure of peace had fallen to a historic low, driven by a surge in active conflicts and a staggering toll in human life and displacement.

Thomas Morgan, the institute's chief research officer, laid out the dimensions of the crisis in an interview. The deterioration showed up in two ways. First, conditions inside individual countries had worsened in 99 of the 163 nations studied, while only 62 had improved. Second, and more alarmingly, the number of active state-based conflicts had climbed to 63 by 2025—the highest count since the end of the Second World War. The expansion of warfare across borders had been equally dramatic. In 2003, roughly 59 countries were engaged in external conflicts. By 2026, that number had doubled to 103. The primary driver, Morgan explained, was the growing tendency of outside states to intervene in other nations' civil wars, typically by backing an existing government against internal rebel or terrorist groups. Countries including Niger, the United States, Iran, Tanzania, Cameroon, and Rwanda had been among the most active participants in these interventions. While most of this involvement took the form of limited support rather than full-scale military operations, and included some peacekeeping efforts, the pattern reflected a fundamental shift: more states now possessed both the capacity and the political will to act militarily beyond their borders, and fewer faced the constraint of alignment with a single dominant power.

The human cost had become catastrophic. Conflict deaths reached just over 181,000 in 2025—roughly six times the figure from 2008. In a grim milestone, 20 countries each recorded more than 1,000 conflict deaths, the highest number in the index's history. Beyond those killed, 117 million people had been displaced from their homes. In 100 countries, the economic burden of refugees and internally displaced persons had surged by an average of 23 percent between 2024 and 2025 alone.

The global economy bore the weight of this violence in ways both visible and vast. The total economic impact of violence reached $21.8 trillion in 2025, measured in constant purchasing power parity terms. That figure represented 10.5 percent of global gross domestic product—or roughly $2,657 per person on the planet. The year-over-year increase of 3.2 percent was driven largely by a spike in military spending, which rose 5.8 percent in 2025, the largest single-year jump since the index began. Over the past decade, global military expenditure had climbed for ten consecutive years to reach $2.9 trillion. For countries trapped in active conflict, the arithmetic was even more brutal. Since 2008, the cost of conflict deaths had risen by 459 percent, while the combined costs of deaths, economic losses, and displacement had each more than tripled.

Morgan pointed to a troubling erosion in the mechanisms that had historically ended wars. In the 1970s, roughly 23 percent of state-based conflicts concluded through peace agreements. By the 2010s, that share had fallen to about 4 percent. Similarly, the proportion of conflicts ending in outright military victory had collapsed from 49 percent to 9 percent. Wars, in other words, were becoming harder to finish. Against this backdrop, spending on peacebuilding and peacekeeping amounted to just $49.2 billion in 2025—roughly 0.5 percent of global military expenditure. The disparity underscored a fundamental imbalance in how the world allocated resources to conflict versus peace.

Technology had introduced new complications. Drone strikes, once rare, had become routine. The number of recorded drone strike events rose roughly 115-fold between 2018 and 2025, with 565 different armed groups carrying out at least one drone attack during that period. Morgan emphasized that the institute's concern was not with artificial intelligence itself but with the speed at which it operated and the lack of meaningful oversight. Of 193 UN member states, 118 were not participating in any of the seven leading AI governance initiatives. Yet Morgan was careful to note that the technology cut both ways. AI had enabled applications in mediation, translation, conflict analysis, satellite monitoring, and atrocity documentation. Yale's Humanitarian Research Lab had used satellite imagery to track 19,500 Ukrainian children deported to facilities in Russia and Belarus. The problem, he said, was that military applications were well-funded and deployed while peace applications remained fragmented and underfunded.

The geography of peace had become increasingly unequal. The ten most peaceful countries—Iceland, New Zealand, Switzerland, Slovenia, Ireland, Austria, Portugal, Singapore, Finland, and Japan—shared certain characteristics: well-functioning governments, low corruption, sound business environments, respect for the rights of others, and good relations with neighbors. Seven of these ten were in Western and Central Europe. The ten least peaceful—Russia, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ukraine, Israel, South Sudan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, and Mali—faced the opposite conditions. The gaps were largest in political instability, state violence against citizens, access to small arms, relations with neighbors, and the intensity of internal conflict. Yet Morgan noted that some measures showed little separation between the most and least peaceful countries. Incarceration rates were identical across both groups, and weapons imports were roughly equal, suggesting that militarization alone was a poor predictor of peace.

The most troubling trend was the widening inequality between the most and least peaceful nations. The 25 most peaceful countries had deteriorated by just 0.3 percent since 2008, while the 25 least peaceful had declined by 18.9 percent. The global average, Morgan cautioned, masked the severity of what was happening at the bottom. Still, he noted that the report contained some modest improvements. Deaths from terrorism had fallen to their lowest level since 2008. UN peacekeeping funding had recorded the largest improvement of any indicator. Homicide rates and public perceptions of crime had improved over the long term. These gains, however, appeared fragile against the larger currents of conflict, displacement, and the weakening of the institutions and mechanisms that had once brought wars to an end.