Coronavirus causes global rise in civil unrest: Report

Global conflicts declined over past year but uncertainty rose due to the pandemic, says Institute of Economics and Peace.

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. 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.