While something bad could happen to you in even the statistically safest countries, there are places in the world that are best to avoid if you want to lead a safe, peaceful existence.
One highly regarded source on the subject is The Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), an international non-partisan thinktank based in Sydney, Australia, that focuses upon peace as a positive, achievable and tangible measure of human well-being and progress. As part of that mission, for the last 15 years, IEP has been analyzing data on 23 different indicators — from homicide and violent crime rates to terrorism, political instability, violent demonstrations and weapons imports. All that information goes into compiling its annual Global Peace Index, which ranks countries on how peaceful — or conversely, how dangerous — they are.
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In IEP's Global Peace Index 2021 report, issued in June, the organization concluded that the world became less peaceful overall, with peacefulness improving in 87 countries but deteriorating in 73 others, with the declines generally steeper than improvements elsewhere.
While a low rating on the index doesn't directly equate to the risk of violence, "being ranked amongst the 10 least peaceful countries almost always means that a country is involved in an ongoing conflict, has high levels of violence or is highly militaristic," Thomas Morgan, IEP's associate director of research, says via email.
So what are the 10 most dangerous countries in the world? Here they are ranked from least to most dangerous according to the IEP index.
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