By Youssef Sourgo
Morocco World News
Casablanca, June 14, 2013
With maintaining peace gradually becoming a challenging task in today’s world, Morocco managed to score “high” in the recent Global Peace Index (GPI) report.
The kingdom ranked 57 out of 162 countries featured in GPI’s peace-measuring report. The North African country appears among other countries with a “high” peace index, such as the U.K (44), France (53) and Kuwait (37).
With its “high” ranking at the international level, Morocco thus ranks first in the Maghreb, ahead of Tunisia (77), Algeria (119) and Mauritania (122).
As to the “very high index” category, Iceland topped the list, ahead of Canada, Germany and Japan. On the other hand, Afghanistan ranked last in the “very low index” category, scoring lower than Syria and Iraq.
The GPI annual report, which is carried out by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), a non-governmental organization based in Sidney (Australia), ranks countries in terms of their peacefulness according to 5 categories: Very high, high, medium, low and very low.
The GPI report bases its ranking of countries in terms of peacefulness on the following set of criteria:
- The level of organized conflict
- Relations with neighboring countries
- The level of perceived criminality in society
- Political instability
- Terrorist activity
- The number of homicides per 100,000 people
- The level of violent crime
- Likelihood of violent demonstrations
- The number of jailed population per 100,000 people
- Nuclear and heavy weapons capability
- Ease of access to small arms and light weapons