Steve Killelea

So if you think of health, you think there's been great breakthroughs in pathology.

None of us are going to die a heart attack young.

However, it wasn't until we studied healthy people we knew what we needed to stay well,

fit and healthy so it's things like right exercise good mental disposition correct diet you're not going to learn any of those things from studying someone on their deathbed and so that's different than studying conflict and peace the analogy is the same so in the book peace in the age of chaos or set all this out in in graphic detail yeah and it's really interesting what what

It didn't turn out to be much of a surprise, really.

It's exactly a lot of the way you'd think it would be.

The middle ranks turned out to be a lot more interesting.

So if we go to the top of the index, you'll find that five of them are in Scandinavia, three of them are in Asia.

you'll find that one's in North America and one's in the middle of the Atlantic.

And that's number one on the index.

And that's Iceland.

So a lot of people cracked a joke.

Well, no wonder Iceland's at the top.

It's too cold for anyone to go outside at night.

But when you look at their history, they've got an enviable history of peace dating back a thousand years.

The last major

fight they had internally within the country was about 1060 AD where about 400 people had been killed and they haven't had an internal conflict since they created the first parliament in the world and also if we look at these countries at the top of the index all bar one rule fully fledged democracies and the one country which is not is Singapore so there's this relationship

between democracy, and this is just not elections, but fully functional democracy with separations of powers and peace.

But the thing for your readers, which I think, again, set it out really clearly in the book, Peace in the Age of Chaos,

is the economic factors associated with peace.