The coronavirus pandemic has caused a global rise in civil unrest and political insecurity, according to the 15th edition of the Global Peace Index (GPI) released on Thursday,
Al Jazeera reports.
The GPI, an annual report produced by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), ranks 163 independent states and territories according to their level of peacefulness and is the world’s leading measure of global peacefulness.
“This year’s results show that the average level of global peacefulness deteriorated by 0.07 per cent,” said the report, highlighting that this was “the ninth deterioration in peacefulness in the last thirteen years.
“However, the change in score is the second smallest in the history of the index,” it added.
According to the 2021 GPI, while global conflicts and crises that emerged in the past decade declined, they were replaced “with a new wave of tension and uncertainty as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and rising tensions between many of the major powers”.
In 2020, the world witnessed almost 15,000 violent protests and riots. The damage it caused came with a hefty price of about $15 trillion or 11.6 percent of the world’s gross domestic product (GDP).
Among those, more than 5,000 were pandemic-related and were recorded between January 2020 and April 2021.
India, Eastern Europe and the United States showed the most deterioration on that level due to the rise in demonstrations over coronavirus-related restrictions.
It is estimated that more than two-thirds of the world’s population has experienced lockdown measures, lasting from weeks to months.
According to World Bank estimates, the global economy shrank by 4.3 percent in 2020, wiping out trillions of dollars. Countries already facing economic hardship sank further into debt.
A report by Oxfam International (PDF) estimates that it could take more than a decade for the world’s poorest to recover from the economic fallout of the pandemic.
