Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: The Global Peace Index (GPI) is a widely used indicator that serves as a benchmark for the level of peace and the absence of violence in a country. However, its components focus primarily on recording armed conflicts and violent incidents and thus tend to prioritize a negative conception of peace, understood as the absence of war. In dialogue with Galtung’s proposals on positive and negative peace, as well as with the notions of imperfect peace and transformative process put forward by Muñoz and Ramos, this study questions the validity of the GPI in capturing the coexistence of peace and violence within the same social reality. To this end, the Social Violence Risk Index (SVRI) was constructed using principal component analysis, and its values were subsequently correlated with those of the GPI. The results show a slight negative correlation between the two indices, indicating that they refer to complementary and not mutually exclusive processes. Based on these findings, the conceptual biases involved in measuring peace and violence are discussed.
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7204881398