A country can look peaceful while becoming less capable of remaining so. Elections are still held, courts continue operating, schools open each morning, businesses trade, streets remain broadly safe and most people continue with ordinary life. There may be rising distrust, worsening perceptions of fairness, increasing political hostility or declining confidence in institutions, but none of these necessarily looks like a peace crisis. There may be no widespread violence at all.
That distinction between visible calm and underlying resilience is central to the Institute for Economics and Peace’s 2026 Positive Peace Report. The Global Peace Index measures what IEP calls negative peace, broadly the absence of violence or fear of violence. The Positive Peace Index examines the attitudes, institutions and structures associated with societies that are better able to sustain peaceful outcomes over time. Peace, as used throughout this series, is therefore not simply quiet. It is the capacity to manage disagreement, competing interests, pressure and change without destructive escalation.
A society can be calm for very different reasons. It may possess trusted institutions, legitimate ways to resolve grievances and strong social resilience. Or it may suppress disagreement so effectively that conflict becomes largely invisible. Authoritarian stability is the clearest warning against confusing the two. A government can maintain order through censorship, surveillance, repression and fear. Public protest may be rare and political opposition largely absent, yet this tells us little about whether grievances can be expressed safely, whether institutions possess legitimacy or whether the system can absorb a major political or economic shock without relying on coercion. Repressed conflict has not necessarily been resolved. It may simply have lost legitimate channels through which to appear.
IEP describes one important imbalance as a Positive Peace deficit. This occurs when a country’s current level of internal peace is substantially stronger than its underlying Positive Peace foundations. In simple terms, observable peace is running ahead of the system’s apparent capacity to sustain it. This is a risk indicator rather than a prediction. Countries can carry significant deficits without deteriorating, and no index can tell us that violence will occur in a particular place at a particular time.
The historical pattern is nevertheless striking. Between 2009 and 2024, 83.3 per cent of countries with large Positive Peace deficits deteriorated in internal peace, compared with 54 per cent of countries overall. Of the 30 countries with the largest deficits in 2009, 25 subsequently deteriorated; all 16 with the largest deficits did so. The lesson is not that a deficit reveals a hidden countdown to conflict. It is that current peacefulness and future resilience are not the same thing. A society can continue functioning normally while the institutions and relationships that make that normality possible become less capable of absorbing pressure.
The COVID-19 pandemic provides a useful illustration because the broad shock was global while the consequences differed markedly between societies. IEP found that countries with stronger Positive Peace foundations recovered more quickly. Between 2021 and 2024, countries in the highest third of the Positive Peace rankings improved their scores by an average of 2.1 per cent, compared with 0.6 per cent among countries in the lowest third. The same shock entered very different institutional, economic and social environments. Trust mattered when governments asked people to accept extraordinary restrictions. Administrative competence mattered when health systems had to respond rapidly. Information quality mattered when uncertainty created an enormous demand for explanation. Economic resilience mattered when work and supply chains were disrupted.
None of this means those underlying conditions completely determined each country’s response. Leadership, geography, demographics, public health capacity and chance all mattered. The systems insight is narrower: shocks interact with what is already there. After major disruption there is a tendency to treat whatever followed as having been caused by the disruption itself. Sometimes that is true; sometimes a shock accelerates a trend already under way or reveals a weakness that was easier to ignore during calmer periods. The Positive Peace Report makes this distinction explicitly. Several indicators fell sharply during the pandemic and subsequently recovered, suggesting temporary disruption. Others continued trajectories already established before 2020. Well-Functioning Government, for example, had been deteriorating before the pandemic and continued doing so afterwards at a similar rate. A crisis can therefore reveal a system without having created it.
One area where the report records particularly significant deterioration is the information environment. Global Positive Peace improved modestly over the decade to 2024, but much of that improvement was driven by telecommunications infrastructure. Remove that indicator and the overall global movement becomes slightly negative. Societies have become dramatically more connected while some of the conditions supporting reliable information have weakened. Freedom of the press deteriorated by 22.1 per cent globally between 2015 and 2024, with declines in 141 countries.
Information matters because it mediates nearly every other disagreement. People rely on it to assess the economy, crime, migration, public health, war and government performance. A democracy does not need universal agreement, but it does need enough common ground for disagreement to remain meaningful. If citizens increasingly dispute not only what should be done but how facts are established, the institutions through which democratic conflict is resolved come under greater pressure.
Systems can also reach points where gradual deterioration changes the effect of the next shock. The Positive Peace Report examines tipping points in relationships involving corruption, government effectiveness, rule of law, regulatory quality and income. These should not be imagined as precise lines on a dashboard. Their value lies in explaining why the same pressure can have different consequences depending on the condition of the system receiving it. A modest decline in trust may make little visible difference because people continue accepting election results, obeying laws and using public institutions. If distrust becomes sufficiently widespread, however, attempts by institutions to restore confidence can themselves be interpreted as manipulation. The weakness begins reinforcing itself.
IEP describes two broad configurations towards which societies can gravitate. One is Sustainable Peace, where relatively strong institutions, social cohesion and low levels of violence reinforce one another. The other is the Conflict Trap, where weak institutions and persistent violence become mutually reinforcing. These are best understood as tendencies rather than rigid categories. Violence can weaken institutions, which then become less capable of resolving disputes; poor dispute resolution increases grievance and instability; instability discourages investment and weakens government capacity. The reverse can also occur, as effective institutions reduce uncertainty, participation builds confidence and successful cooperation reinforces legitimacy.
For Australia, this argument should be approached without alarmism. We are not remotely comparable to societies experiencing state collapse or civil war. The value of the analysis lies in beginning from strength. A high-peace society has more room to notice gradual weakening before it becomes a security issue. Prevention does not mean treating ordinary disagreement as dangerous. Democratic societies need protest, industrial conflict, political opposition, advocacy and criticism. The concern is whether the institutions through which those conflicts are expressed remain legitimate enough to contain disagreement without coercion or violence.
Peace is not quiet. It is capacity. A peaceful society should therefore ask not only whether destructive conflict is absent today, but whether its institutions and relationships are becoming more or less capable of managing the pressures that will arrive tomorrow.
