The Global Peace Index Ranks 163 Nations. It Doesn’t Tell You Why the Least Peaceful Were All Colonized.

The Global Peace Index 2025 is a useful document. Compiled annually by the Institute for Economics and Peace, it measures 23 indicators across 163 nations and ranks which countries are the safest and which are the most violent. Iceland is first, for the seventeenth consecutive year. Somalia is near the bottom. The data is real. The framing is incomplete.

What the index does not say — and what Ubuntu philosophy demands we name — is that the ten least peaceful countries in the world are not random. Sudan. South Sudan. Democratic Republic of Congo. Yemen. Afghanistan. Syria. Somalia. Central African Republic. These nations did not become conflict zones by accident. They were colonized, extracted, destabilized, and left with borders drawn by foreign powers, economies stripped of their value, and governance systems imposed from outside. The Global Peace Index measures the world. It does not name who made it.

Ubuntu—umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, I am because we are—offers a different framework. Peace is not the absence of war. Peace is the presence of right relationships: between individuals, communities, nations, and the land. By that measure, a country can rank first on the GPI and still carry profound peace deficits—in how it treats its immigrants, its Indigenous peoples, and its Black residents. And a community can hold peace within itself even in the midst of externally imposed violence.

What the Data Shows

The 2025 GPI found that global peacefulness declined for the seventeenth consecutive year. Seventeen of 23 indicators deteriorated since the index began in 2008. The economic cost of violence reached $19.86 trillion — 11.56% of global GDP, or approximately $2,446 per person on Earth.

Military spending accounted for 45% of that cost: $9 trillion globally in 2024 alone. Global spending on peacebuilding and peacekeeping: $47.2 billion — less than one half of one percent of what the world spent on weapons and armies. That is the arithmetic of a civilization that funds war and defunds peace.

The ten most peaceful countries are Iceland, Ireland, New Zealand, Austria, Switzerland, Portugal, Singapore, Denmark, Finland, and Japan. They share high levels of institutional trust, low levels of militarization, and robust social investment. They are also, without exception, wealthy nations that did not bear the receiving end of colonization. That is not a coincidence. That is history.

The Colonialism Question

The bottom ten—Russia, Ukraine, Sudan, DRC, Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, South Sudan, Central African Republic, and Somalia—are not peaceless because their people are less capable of building peace. Many of these nations have ancient traditions of governance, conflict resolution, and communal care that predate European contact by centuries.

They are conflict-affected because of the Scramble for Africa (1884), the Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916), the Cold War proxy conflicts that weaponized entire generations (1950s–1990s), and the ongoing extraction of their resources by multinational corporations and international financial institutions. Sudan’s conflict lines follow British-drawn borders. The DRC’s instability is inseparable from the extraction of coltan, cobalt, and gold that powers the global electronics industry—including the devices you are reading this on. Yemen’s civil war is fueled by weapons sold by nations that rank near the top of the GPI.

The Global Peace Index is a measurement tool, not a justice analysis. It does not distinguish between nations that achieved peace and nations that exported their violence elsewhere. It does not ask who armed whom, who drew which borders, or whose minerals are inside which phone.

“The index measures the wound. Ubuntu demands we name who made it — and build the conditions so it never happens again.”

Ubuntu Village

Ancestral Peace as a Living Technology

Before colonization disrupted them, African and Indigenous communities maintained sophisticated frameworks for conflict resolution and collective peace. The Gacaca courts of Rwanda predate European contact—a community-based restorative justice system that, in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide, helped process over 1.9 million cases that formal courts could never have handled. The Ubuntu Baraza—community councils throughout East Africa—provided platforms for dialogue, restitution, and reconciliation that kept communities cohesive across generations.

The Akan concept of sankofa—looking back to move forward—holds that wisdom is not lost, only buried. Igbo age-grade systems built civic responsibility across generations. Māori tikanga provided frameworks for restorative justice long before Western criminology was invented. These were not primitive precursors to modern peacebuilding. They were sophisticated technologies of collective peace that colonization deliberately dismantled, replacing them with adversarial legal systems, extractive economies, and imposed borders that manufactured conflict where community had existed.

This is not nostalgia. It is a recognition that the knowledge base for sustainable peace already exists within the communities the GPI ranks lowest. The work is not to impose Western models of governance onto the Global South. It is to resource, protect, and center the peace traditions that already live there—and that colonialism spent generations trying to erase.

What Ubuntu Village Sees

Ubuntu Village works in Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria — three nations navigating colonial legacies while building extraordinary community resilience. What we witness in our programs is not the absence of peace. It is peace-building in its most ancestral and enduring form: the gathering of elders, the raising of children in community, the cultivation of land in reciprocity, and the healing of bodies and spirits through tradition.

The GPI does not measure that. It measures police expenditures, weapons imports, and conflict deaths. It is a useful lens. It is not the whole picture. Peace that is sustainable—not just statistically peaceful but ancestrally whole—requires what Robert Bullard called “environmental justice,” what Dr. Frantz Fanon called the decolonization of the mind, and what Ubuntu calls collective humanity. It requires we ask not just “how peaceful is this country?” but “peaceful for whom, on whose land, and at whose expense?”

What the GPI Gets Right

The data matters. 122 million people displaced globally is a crisis of profound human suffering that demands a response. The peacekeeping investment gap — $47.2 billion versus $9 trillion in military spending — is a policy failure that advocates and communities can and should name loudly. The consistent evidence from Iceland to Portugal to Singapore confirms what ancestral communities always knew: low militarization, high social investment, and institutional trust produce measurable peace. These are not Nordic secrets. They are human principles that communities across Africa and the Global South practiced for millennia before they were disrupted.

The index also makes visible the scale of what conflict costs: $19.86 trillion that could fund schools, hospitals, clean water systems, and ancestral land restoration for generations. That visibility has value. The question is whether we look at those numbers and ask only “How do we stop the fighting?” — or whether we go deeper and ask who profits from its continuation, how it started, and what it would actually cost to address its roots.

What This Means for Our Work

At Ubuntu Village, global peace is not an abstraction. It is the daily practice of community health, ancestral education, and cross-cultural solidarity that our programs in East Harlem, Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria carry forward. Peace in our framework is not a ranking. It is relational—woven into how we show up for one another, how we care for our elders, how we raise our children, and how we heal our bodies and our histories.

Mbeki called it the African Renaissance. Nkrumah called it Pan-Africanism. Chinua Achebe told us that when the storyteller changes, the village recovers its voice. These are not philosophical abstractions. They are action frameworks — maps for the world we are building together, one community at a time, one healing circle at a time, one ancestral practice reclaimed at a time.

We do not need the Global Peace Index to certify our peace. But we can use it as a mirror — to see clearly what the world has built in the name of security, to name what is missing from that picture, and to put our bodies and resources behind the version of peace that our ancestors always knew was possible. Ubuntu does not wait. It lives in the peace it is building.

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References

• Institute for Economics and Peace (2025). Global Peace Index 2025. IEP.
• World Population Review (2025). Most Peaceful Countries 2025.
• Global Finance Magazine (2025). World’s Most Peaceful Country 2025.
• Bullard, R.D. (1990). Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality. Westview Press.
• Fanon, F. (1961). The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press.
• Clark, P. (2010). The Gacaca Courts, Post-Genocide Justice and Reconciliation in Rwanda. Cambridge University Press.

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