Global peacefulness deteriorated by 0.7% in 2025, marking the 12th consecutive year of decline, according to the 2026 Global Peace Index (GPI). Produced annually by the Institute for Economics and Peace, the Global Peace Index is the world’s leading measure of peacefulness.
The GPI covers 99.7% of the global population and is constructed using 23 qualitative and quantitative indicators from internationally recognized sources. These indicators assess peacefulness across three broad areas: the level of societal safety and security, the extent of ongoing domestic and international conflict, and the degree of militarisation.
According to the 2026 report, the global security environment is now at its most fragile and militarised point since the GPI was first published twenty years ago. From the devastating civil war in Sudan and the grinding conflict in Ukraine to the brief but consequential Twelve-Day War in Iran in June 2025, violence is becoming more widespread, more complex. and more difficult to contain. Of the 163 countries assessed, 99 became less peaceful in 2025. Fourteen of the Index’s 23 indicators worsened, while only eight improved.
Conflict remains the main driver of this deterioration. The number of active state-based conflicts reached 61 in 2024, the highest level since the end of World War II. The rise stems largely from internationalized intrastate conflicts, which have surged by more than 175% since 2010. While conflict deaths fell from their 2023 peak, they remained at the second-highest level recorded in the Index’s history.
The geography of peace is also becoming more uneven. The gap between the world’s most and least peaceful countries has widened by 11.7% over the past two decades. Western and Central Europe remain the world’s most peaceful region, while the Middle East and North Africa are the least peaceful.
The economic cost of war
The global economic impact of violence was US$21.8 trillion in constant purchasing power parity (PPP) terms in 2025, equivalent to 10.5%of global GDP, or US$2,657 per person. This represents an increase of 3.2% over the past year, largely due to higher military expenditure, which saw the largest single-year increase since the Index’s inception.
Whilst military and internal security expenditure accounts for 73% of the total economic impact of violence, peacebuilding and peacekeeping accounted for just 0.5% of total military spending in PPP terms. In the 10 countries most affected by violence, the economic cost of violence averaged 23.4% of GDP in 2025, compared to just 2.2% for the 10 least affected countries.
The “Great Fragmentation” of geopolitics
The sustained decline in global peace sits against a structural shift in the geopolitical landscape, which the IEP describes as the “Great Fragmentation.”. Emerging in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, it marks the third major geopolitical era of the past half-century, following the Cold War and the post-1990 period of rapid globalization.
At its core is a redistribution of global power towards a more diffuse and contested order. The influence of established European economies has eroded sharply in recent years: between 1995 and 2023, Germany’s share of global GDP fell by 49%, France’s by 44%, Italy’s by 42%, and the United Kingdom’s by 27%.
As this weight has shifted, space has opened for a new cohort of influential middle powers, including the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Turkey, and Mexico. The number of middle-power states has almost doubled since 1991, rising from 9 to 16, while the number of emerging powers has tripled. These countries are increasingly shaping global affairs, often with looser alignment to “superpowers” like the USA than earlier middle powers such as Australia.
The result is a more fragmented, competitive international system. Geopolitical risk now exceeds Cold War levels, driven by higher military spending, weakening multilateral institutions, a surge in trade restrictions, and intensifying rivalry among both major and middle powers. The report issues a stark warning on this point, stating “the global geopolitical and economic system may be approaching a tipping point and, if passed, it is difficult to predict what the new system would look like.”
The breakdown of traditional war-ending mechanisms
Conflicts are both more frequent and increasingly resistant to resolution. The GPI data points to a clear long-term shift in how wars end. In the 1970s, nearly half of state-level conflicts ended in a decisive victory for one side. By the 2010s, that share had fallen to around 9%. Over the same period, peace agreements dropped from 23% of outcomes to roughly 4%.
Today, wars do not end so much as fade. The most common outcome is “low-activity termination”: conflicts that decline in intensity without any formal settlement. Rather than being resolved, underlying grievances persist, leaving the door open to renewed violence.
One reason for this trend is that wars are increasingly self-financed. States and armed groups fund themselves through illicit economies, including drug production, gold smuggling, mineral extraction, and protection rackets. Between 2015 and 2024, the value of illicit drug economies in five major conflict-affected states rose from around US$14 billion to US$59 billion. Wars of this kind are difficult to end without first dismantling the financial incentives that sustain them.
Another factor making wars more intractable is the way advances in military technology are lowering the barriers to entry for conflict. Tools such as commercial drones, encrypted communications, satellite imagery, and advanced cyber capabilities are now cheaper and more accessible to both state and non-state actors. This has made it significantly easier to initiate and sustain violence without the need for large-scale conventional military capacity.
The rise of “conflict clusters”
The same forces that are making individual wars harder to end are also increasing their tendency to spill across borders. As conflicts become more prolonged, better financed, and more technologically sophisticated, they entrench deeper regional networks. Linkages include refugee flows, weapons pipelines, sanctuary territory, funding channels, and shared ideological ties, all of which operate as conflict transmission mechanisms.
A major trend identified in the 2026 GPI report is the rise of “conflict clusters.” Today, almost every country experiencing conflict is embedded in one of eight identifiable regional clusters, where multiple wars intertwine across national borders. The clearest example is the Horn of Africa, where ongoing conflicts in Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, and South Sudan are now profoundly entangled and mutually reinforcing.
Speaking at the GPI launch event, Dr Terry-Ann Gilbert-Roberts, Social Development Research Manager at The Commonwealth, admitted that the changing patterns of conflict spread “raise questions about the contributions that diplomatic and multilateral institutions can play to make peacebuilding work.”
“Peace is no longer just a national issue. It is fundamentally regional”, she said.“This shared vulnerability — this interconnectedness — makes cooperation not just desirable, but essential.”
AI and the future of warfare
Finally, artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as one of the most consequential forces reshaping modern warfare, transforming how wars are fought, how decisions are made, and how quickly lethal force is deployed.
The transformation is most visible in the proliferation of drones, which the IEP designates “the defining weapon of modern warfare.” The war in Ukraine has served as “the operational test bed” for autonomous systems at scale, they say, with recorded drone strike events rising from just 364 in 2018 to more than 42,000 in 2025. Globally, drone attacks increased by around 11,500% over the same period.
AI is also moving further into “the cognitive core of military targeting” — overtaking human decision making. In Gaza, for example, the Israel Defense Forces’ Lavender system reportedly identified around 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants. Operators spent as little as 20 seconds reviewing each target, despite an estimated 10% error rate.
This shift is driving what the IEP terms “kill-chain compression.” Decisions that once took hours or days can now be made in minutes or seconds. Target-to-fire timelines have shrunk dramatically, from around a day for cruise missile strikes in the 1990s to as little as five seconds using Russia’s V2U autonomous target-selection system.
Governments are investing heavily in these capabilities. In the United States, for example, the ceiling on Palantir’s Maven Smart System contract with the Pentagon rose by 165% in a single year, reaching approximately US$1.3 billion by May 2025.
Meanwhile, efforts to govern the technology lag far behind its deployment. Of the UN’s 193 member states, 118 are not involved in any of the seven leading international AI governance initiatives, leaving a widening gap between technological capability and regulatory oversight.
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While AI is being rapidly weaponized, its potential as a tool for peace remains largely underdeveloped. The most advanced use of AI for peace is in mediation. AI-driven sentiment analysis is helping to map positions, synthesize competing goals, and accelerate agreement between opposing parties. Improved machine translation is also expanding access to dialogue, making negotiations more inclusive and ensuring humanitarian information reaches communities more effectively.
AI is also strengthening accountability for atrocities. Human rights organizations are using machine learning to process vast datasets of open-source evidence — including satellite imagery, social media content and leaked documents — speeding up the identification and documentation of potential war crimes.
The limiting factors for AI for peace are not capability, which already exists, but rather resources and prioritization. As the IEP puts it: “The defining peace and conflict question of the late 2020s is no longer whether AI will reshape global peacefulness, but along which dimensions, at what speed, and to whose benefit.”
What’s next for global peace?
Overall, the 2026 Global Peace Index points to a world entering a new era of conflict. The pressures shaping the international system are no longer acting in isolation; they are reinforcing one another. Wars are easier to start, harder to end, and increasingly difficult to contain within national borders.
Geopolitical fragmentation and rapid technological change are reshaping warfare faster than governments, peacekeepers, and international institutions can adapt. This has widened the gap between the realities of modern conflict and the tools designed to prevent or resolve it.
In that gap lies the central tension of the coming decade. As the technologies of conflict spread and evolve faster than ever, the institutions, attitudes, and structures of Positive Peace become both more essential and more difficult to build. Without sustained investment in these foundations, global peacefulness is likely to remain on a downward path.
Editor’s Note: The opinions expressed here by the authors are their own, not those of impakter.com — In the Cover Photo: An explosion in a building in Gaza resulting from Israeli bombing, Feb. 22, 2025. Cover Photo Credit: Mohammed Ibrahim
