Bahrain Mirror: Bahrain's global peace ranking continues to drop for the sixth consecutive year reaching 132 out of 162 countries according to a report by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP).

Last year, Bahrain was ranked 107 globally, which was considered to be a slight improvement compared to 2014, when it was at 111. The island kingdom's ranking has; however, fallen 25 places since 2015, marking an increase in violence.

In the 2016 report, Bahrain scored 2.1 out of 5 on the domestic and international conflicts indicator, 2.9 on society and security and 2 on militarization.

The 2016 Global Peace Index (GPI) shows the world became less peaceful in the last year, reinforcing the underlying trend of declining peace over the last decade. Results also show a growing global inequality in peace, with the most peaceful countries continuing to improve while the least peaceful are falling into greater violence and conflict.

The tenth edition of the GPI finds that overall global levels of peace continue to deteriorate while the gap between the most and least peaceful countries continues to widen.

While the the world became less peaceful in 2015, many countries also improved. In fact, slightly more countries improved, 81 - than deteriorated, 79.  As the size of the deteriorations was larger than the improvements, there was a decline in the global average.

"As internal conflicts in MENA become more entrenched, external parties are increasingly becoming more involved and the potential for indirect or ‘war by proxy' between nation states is rising. This was already evident in Syria with the conflict between the Assad regime and multiple non-state actors, and is now spilling into countries such as Yemen. There is a broader proxy conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and more recently both US and Russia have increased their level of involvement," said Steve Killelea, Founder and Executive Chairman of the IEP.

The tenth edition of the GPI is the world's leading measure of global peacefulness produced by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP). It gauges on-going domestic and international conflict, safety and security in society, and the degree of militarisation in 163 countries and territories by taking into account 23 indicators. The tenth anniversary report presents the most comprehensive analysis to date on the trends in peace and violence over the past decade. The 2016 edition expands its coverage by including Palestine for the first time.

Arabic Version