Seeking peace? Try world's "most peaceful" nation, Iceland

Among BRIC nations, China ranked the highest at 67th, followed by Brazil (90th), India (107th) and Russia (131st)

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In South America, countries such as Colombia (130th), Venezuela (123rd), Ecuador (100th) and Brazil (90th) were ranked lower than Peru (80th).

On the other hand, Bolivia (78th), Paraguay (70th) and Argentina (56th) received better scores.

The two most peaceful countries in South America were Uruguay, which was ranked 21st and Chile, which earned a spot in 19th place.

All the countries were ranked on the basis of 24 parameters which determine how peaceful they are internally and how they interact with the external world, namely, military might, conflicts, UN deployment overseas, levels of violent crime, prison population, respect for human rights, the numbers of soldiers killed overseas, arms sales, access to primary education, etc.

"The concept of peace is notoriously difficult to define. [But] What we do is we take the absence of violence as the definition for peace and then we measure it internally and externally, and we look at things like the number of people in jail, the level of violent crime, the number of homicides, state sponsored terror," said Steve Killelea, an Australian philanthropist and entrepreneur and founder of the Global Peace Index.

"Externally we'd look at the number of conflicts, nations involved in battlefield, deaths, size of its military compared to its percentage of GDP (gross domestic product)," he said.

For instance, what "drags US down is its internal situation," Killelea said. "It has got more people in jail than any other nation in the world, and it is followed by Russia then North Korea."

"It has got a high level of homicides, a high level of violent crime, let's say, compared to other OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) nations, a strong likelihood of terrorist attacks and high availability of guns," he said. "Its overall score is a reflection of that. The index is not making any moral statements by the ranking."

Giving another example, Killelea said that though New Zealand was ranked fourth on the index, its neighbor Australia was way below at 27th.

The reason is because of Australia's "involvement in Afghanistan, the potential for terrorist attacks, which is higher than New Zealand, and also that (it) spend(s) more money on the military," he said.

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