Chairman’s Message 
2020 — A Year Like No Other

2020 has been like no other year. A pandemic, the worst economic contractions on record, and occurring at a time when most economies were already sluggish with flat productivity growth. Yet living in Australia has provided distance from some of these harsh realities — almost no COVID-19, with everyone left relatively free to live their lives. However, my mind cannot help but think to the future, as the next five years are likely to be challenging.

Even with a successful vaccine, the economic turmoil caused by the pandemic will linger for years and compound any existing societal weaknesses. For western democracies, there were warning signs well before the lockdowns. For the last decade many measures of Positive Peace had been deteriorating – group grievances, perceptions of corruption, deteriorating income distribution, fractionalised elites, to name the most important issues. During this period of time demonstrations, riots and general strikes increased by 244 per cent. These factors will only intensify with high unemployment, large debts and a sluggish economic recovery. More than ever, governments need new approaches to manage these issues, but they are not currently apparent, and our leaders are stuck with the same policies of the last two decades.

At the Institute for Economics & Peace, we are working towards a paradigm shift in the way we develop our societies, shifting them towards peace. Our Positive Peace framework contains the very factors that create peace and also generate the background conditions for many of the things we value to flourish, such as higher per capita income, better performance on measures of wellbeing and happiness, stronger performance on ecological measures, to name a few.

In contrast to this outlook, IEP has had an exceptional year. Staff numbers have increased by 15 per cent, we have given or spoken at 250 virtual conferences, and our consulting revenue has tripled. We released a new product — the Ecological Threat Register — which received seven billion media impressions. Our standard products, the Global Peace Index and Global Terrorism Index, also went well recording another 13 billion media impressions between them.

I wish you all well for 2021. Hopefully, the vaccines will work, we will start travelling again, the global economies will begin to recover and I will be travelling again and we can meet once more.

With best wishes,

Steve Killelea
Founder & Executive Chairman, Institute for Economics & Peace

From the Global Peace Index to the COVID-19 & Peace report

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Purchase the debut book from IEP and Global Peace Index Founder Steve Killelea today.

Peace in the Age of Chaos pushes the reader to rethink peace, as something that is pivotal to the development of successful societies. Written with many moving personal experiences it clearly shows how Positive Peace can revitalise western democracies. The book provides intelligent insight for globally conscious and positively motivated readers, as well as policymakers and academics.

From establishing the world’s leading ranking of global peacefulness, the Global Peace Index, to working on aid programmes in one of the most violent places in the world, North East Kivu in the DR Congo, everything in Steve’s journey would lead him on a pathway of ground-breaking discovery to answer one question that bears unrivalled significance to the future sustainability of people and the planet – ‘What creates peace, how do we measure it and why do we need it?’.

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