Doha. Qatar topped the list of Arab nations and the Middle Eastern countries in the Global Peace Index (GPI) for the year 2009, which was announced recently in the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

In the GPI, The State of Qatar was ranked in the 16th position at international level and in the 1st position among the Arab nations and Middle Easter countries scoring 1.392 points, as the index gives 1 rank for nations considered more peaceful and 5 ranks for less peaceful.

The Global Peace Index, which was issued in Washington on 1 June 2009 by the Institute of Economics and Peace, defines the peace as "absence of violence," where the Index measures the countries' peacefulness based on 23 indicators depending on the state of peace both internally and externally.

According to the results issued by the GPI, it has topped New Zealand, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Australia, Sweden and Japan respectively in the list while the Israel, Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq came at the end of the list, which included 144 countries. In the list, Sultanate of Oman (21st rank globally), United Arab Emirates (40th rank globally) and Kuwait (42nd rank globally) followed the Qatar in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th ranks respectively.

The index measures the degree of internal peace based on a number of criteria, including the spread of crime in society, respect for human rights, the murder rate and the level of organized crime, while the indicators of external peace are size of the army, export and import of arms, number of people killed in the war, contributions to the efforts of the United Nations peace-keeping operations and relations with neighboring countries.

It is worth to quote here that, The Global Peace Index is an attempt to measure the relative position of nations’ and regions’ peacefulness and is produced by the Australian think tank “Institute for Economics and Peace”.

The data that is used in the Index is collected from various well-respected sources by the Economist Intelligence Unit, the London based firm part of The Economist Group. The 2009 GPI was released to the press at two events earlier this month, one took place at Centre fro Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC and the other at Central Hall in London, United Kingdom .