Northern Ireland Peace Index

About, Methodology and definitions.

About the Index

Understanding peace beyond the absence of violence

The 1998 Agreement brought an end to sustained political violence in Northern Ireland, a historic achievement that transformed the region's future. More than two decades later, the central question has evolved: not only whether violence has declined, but whether the deeper foundations that allow peace to endure are strengthening alongside that progress.

The Northern Ireland Peace Index provides the first empirical assessment of peace in Northern Ireland. It tracks how peace has evolved between 2019 and 2025, examines differences across Northern Ireland's 11 local government districts, and compares performance against the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland.

Grounded in the Institute for Economics & Peace's empirically derived frameworks of Negative Peace and Positive Peace, the Index provides a structural, evidence-based and spatially detailed account of where the foundations of peace are strongest and where further strengthening is needed - offering a new lens for understanding the conditions that sustain peace over time. The systems-oriented approach provides government, non-governmental organisations and agencies to frame their contributions to systemic change.

Definitions

Negative peace: The absence of violence and the fear of violence. It is measured across six indicators: homicide, paramilitary activities, public disorder, violent and weapon crime, hate crime and worry about crime.
Positive Peace: The attitudes, institutions and structures that create and sustain peaceful societies over the long term. It is measured across eight interconnected pillars and 24 indicators, adapted from IEP's global framework.
Score: Scores range from 1 to 5, where 1 represents the most peaceful outcome and 5 the least peaceful; a lower score indicates greater peace, so a fall is an improvement and a rise a deterioration.
Local Government District (LGD): The 11 council areas of Northern Ireland, the subnational unit at which negative peace indicators are reported in this Index.

Framework

A core feature of the Positive Peace framework is its grounding in systems thinking: an approach to complex phenomena that focuses on the network of relationships within a system rather than on its parts in isolation. Derived from the study of biological, ecological and mechanical systems, it reveals the patterns, interdependencies and feedback loops that linear, reductionist analysis tends to miss. Positive Peace applies this lens by treating societies as systems whose performance reflects the interaction of the eight Pillars. A change in one Pillar, such as an improvement in government functioning, tends to ripple across the others, and the strength of the system as a whole determines its resilience to shocks.

For Northern Ireland, the practical implication is that Positive Peace depends less on any single Pillar than on the interaction between them. Improvements in cross-community relations, trust in institutions and human capital reinforce one another over time, while weakness in one Pillar can offset gains in others. A high score on one Pillar therefore cannot be read as peace in itself. The Index reads the Pillars relationally, through correlation analysis that identifies which structural conditions move with the absence of violence, and council-level analysis showing how the same Pillars combine differently across districts. These interdependencies are structural and slow-moving: the systems lens describes how the conditions for peace hold together, not a mechanism that responds within short policy cycles.

The Index applies the global Positive Peace framework to the Northern Ireland context, adapting its concepts and indicators to match local conditions as closely as the available data allow, and reporting results for Northern Ireland as a whole and for each of the 11 local government districts. Because Positive Peace takes different forms across Northern Ireland's varied geographies, the framework is tailored so the Index can speak directly to each of them.

Two of the eight Pillars have been reframed for this analysis. Good Relations with Neighbours, conceived globally as the quality of relations between states, is operationalised here as the quality of relations between communities, covering cross-community contact, intergroup attitudes and the shared use of public space, while Acceptance of the Rights of Others captures relations across society more broadly. Low Levels of Corruption is reframed as Trust in Institutions, since corruption is not the principal governance challenge in Northern Ireland; the Pillar instead measures public trust in the institutions that govern everyday life, principally devolved government and the criminal justice system, together with the extent to which communities remain free from non-state paramilitary influence. Both adjustments preserve the global framework's conceptual structure while capturing what is most relevant to the Northern Ireland setting.

Northern Ireland Positive Peace Framework

All eight pillars are highly interconnected and interact in complex and mutually reinforcing ways. Together, they form the foundations that build and sustain peaceful societies. Adapted from the IEP's global Positive Peace framework.

Select a pillar to learn more.

Adapted for the Northern Ireland context

Indicators

Negative peace · six indicators

Homicide
Paramilitary activity
Worry about crime
Violent and weapon crime
Public disorder
Hate crime

Positive Peace · 24 indicators across eight pillars

Acceptance of the Rights of Others

Gender Pay Gap, Perceived Discrimination, Social Exclusion

Equitable Distribution of Resources

Poverty, Primary Healthcare Access, Life Satisfaction

Free Flow of Information

Gigabit Capable Broadband, Trust in Media, Media Impartiality

Good Relations with Neighbours

School Segregation Index, Favourability Towards Other Community, Cross-Community Socialising

High Levels of Human Capital

Healthy Life Expectancy, R&D Spending, NEET Rate

Sound Business Environment

GDP per Capita, Financial Openness, Planning Decision Efficiency

Trust in Institutions

Confidence in Justice System, Trust in NI Assembly, Non-state Controlling Influence

Well-functioning Government

Prosecutorial Independence, Public Appointments Parity, Social Housing Processing

Scoring methodology

01
Two composite measures are built: a negative peace composite from six indicators, and a Positive Peace composite from 24 indicators grouped into eight pillars.
02
Each indicator is normalised onto the 1 to 5 banded scale, then combined into pillar and composite scores.
03
Changes reported as percentages are movements in the normalised score, not movements in the underlying raw rate, unless the text states the underlying rate.
04
Negative peace is reported for Northern Ireland as a whole and for each of the 11 Local Government Districts. Positive Peace is reported at pillar and indicator level.
05
Of the 24 indicators, 11 vary at district level and are reported for each of the 11 Local Government Districts.
06
Comparisons with the rest of the UK use nine directly comparable indicators; comparisons with the Republic of Ireland use four, on the comparator's harmonised definitions.

Data sources

PSNI Police Recorded Crime Statistics
PSNI Security Situation Statistics
PSNI Hate Motivation Statistics
NISRA Northern Ireland Safe Community Survey
Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey
NISRA
ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings
ONS Annual Population Survey
ONS Health State Life Expectancy
ONS Business Enterprise Research and Development
ONS Foreign Direct Investment Inward Tables
ONS Regional GDP
DWP Family Resources Survey / Households Below Average Income
Ofcom Connected Nations
CSO
Eurostat
IEP calculations

Notes and limitations

All indicators are drawn from existing secondary sources: official statistics, administrative data and established survey programmes. No new primary data was collected, so the Index is bounded by the coverage, definitions and methodological choices of its source datasets.
Negative peace indicators are normalised against Northern Ireland's own observed range, so those scores are internal to this Index and are not comparable across jurisdictions. Positive Peace indicators are normalised against fixed, world-referenced thresholds, which makes them more comparable internationally, though results are still not directly equivalent to IEP's Global Peace Index or Positive Peace Index scores or to other national indices.
Positive Peace is reported over a shorter window, 2019 to 2025, than negative peace, 2005 to 2025. Positive Peace results are best read as a current snapshot of structural conditions rather than as a long-run trend.
Recorded crime indicators reflect both actual levels of harm and variation in reporting behaviour, policing intensity and recording practice. Changes in recording standards, particularly for violent crime, can affect the series independently of real changes in violence.
Several indicators come from surveys with relatively small Northern Ireland samples, including the Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey and the NISRA Safe Community Survey. Year-on-year movements may reflect sampling variation rather than genuine structural change.
The NILT moved from face-to-face to online administration in 2020, introducing a discontinuity that affects comparability of pre- and post-2020 attitudinal values, most notably favourability towards the other community and cross-community socialising.
Where annual data is unavailable for a specific year or district, values are imputed using interpolation, extrapolation or carry-forward methods and should be treated with additional caution.
The 11 indicators reported at Local Government District level are a subset of the full 24-indicator Positive Peace framework, so district profiles are a partial rather than complete reading and should be read alongside the region-wide results.
For low-frequency indicators such as homicide at district level, small absolute numbers make year-on-year percentage changes sensitive to single events, and the indicator is not applicable in some councils in some years, shown as n/a.
Where observed values approach the upper or lower normalisation bounds, score changes may compress or exaggerate the apparent magnitude of real-world change.
Values in the UK comparison table and the Republic of Ireland comparison table are not interchangeable, because each uses the comparator's definitions and latest comparable year.
Correlations between negative peace and Positive Peace indicators are descriptive associations, not tested or causal relationships. Short paired series can reflect shared time trends rather than substantive links.
Gender-based violence, including violence against women and girls, is not part of the Index framework. Given its significance in Northern Ireland it is discussed as context rather than scored.
Some dimensions significant to peace in Northern Ireland, such as trauma, legacy issues, and grassroots peacebuilding, cannot be quantified with available data and are therefore absent from the Index. The absence of a measure is not evidence of absence of a problem.
The Index tracks changes in peace over time and identifies where conditions are stronger or weaker across the region. It is not a ranking, a verdict on any government or community, or a predictive tool. It measures specific dimensions of peace as defined by the framework, not all things that matter to people living in Northern Ireland.