Positive Peace is defined as the attitudes, institutions and structures that create and sustain peaceful societies. The same factors that create lasting peace also lead to many other positive outcomes that societies aspire to, including:

• thriving economies
• better performance on ecological measures
• high levels of resilience and adaptability to change.

Other factors that improve with Positive Peace are measures of inclusiveness, wellbeing and happiness. Therefore, Positive Peace can be described as creating an optimal environment for human potential to flourish.

Positive Peace is conceptually and empirically linked to socio-economic resilience. Countries with high Positive Peace are more likely to maintain their stability and recover more easily from internal and external shocks. Through the modelling of the relationship between Positive Peace and the actual peace of a country, as measured through the Global Peace Index (GPI), it is possible to predict large falls in peace.

A model based on Positive Peace deficits was able to predict 90 per cent of the countries that would deteriorate in peace over the past decade. Additionally, seven of the ten largest falls on the GPI were also predicted by this model.

• Positive Peace improved 2.4 per cent globally in the past decade.

• This improvement was mainly driven by the Structures domain of Positive Peace, which Key Findings improved by 8 per cent since 2009.

• Seven of the eight Pillars of Positive Peace improved since 2009, although the improvements in High Levels of Human Capital and Well-Functioning Government were minimal.

• Low Levels of Corruption was the only Pillar to deteriorate. This was either a reflection of greater corruption or an increase in awareness of it around the world.

• Almost all regions of the globe recorded improvements in Positive Peace over the past decade, with the Middle East and North Africa improving only marginally. The only region to record a deterioration was North America.

• The largest country improvements in the PPI over the decade were recorded for Uzbekistan, Georgia, Armenia, Côte d’Ivoire and Kazakhstan. The steepest deteriorations were in Syria, Libya, Venezuela, Yemen and South Sudan.