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Simeon Mitropolitski is a Canadian analyst, of Bulgarian origin, and a former syndicated columnist with the Bulgarian News Agency (BTA). He is the author of several hundred articles dealing with hot political and economic topics, both national and international.

He was part of the first group of Bulgarian intellectuals and students that began the opposition movement that finally put an end to the communist regime in this country in 1989, and in 1996-1997 participated in international observation teams during the elections in several Balkan countries - Romania, Albania and Bulgaria.

In 2002 Simeon and his family moved from Bulgaria to Canada where they live now in Montreal, province of Quebec. Simeon is a Master of Political Science from McGill University and a B.A. of Political Science and History.

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How useful is the Global Peace Index, a synthesized index produced by adding several global indexes on different issues, produced mostly by Economist Intelligence Unit, but also by the World Bank, the International Institute for Strategic studies, and the Amnesty International, among the others. For those with serious plans to move to other countries, such index should be considered as essential for first-look information. But how reliable this index is?

It's reliable to some extent. Several individual factors, such as the accidence of wars, both external and civil, the number of deaths per 100,000 due to violent crimes, the level of political instability, even the distrust in others, a fancy term popular ever since the mid-1990s when Robert Putnam published his seminal works on the social capital in countries such as Italy and the United States; these factors indeed contribute to a degree in making a particular country more or less peaceful.

The index, in general, however, is flawed. There are so many problematic factors, that there is no way taking into account so many 'apples' and having precise idea how many 'oranges' there are on the table. The 'potential for terrorist acts' is what it describes, a potential. According to this factor, the countries become more or less peaceful because someone, usually from outside, decides to target people and property inside this country. Following this way of thinking, obviously, if a terrorist organization based in a country X plans attacking targets in a country Y that represent economic interests for companies from a country Z, then the country Y (and not X or Z) becomes less peaceful. Don't ask me what is the logic, because there is no logic.

According to this index, quite paradoxically, the countries become less peaceful when the number of jailed population increases as well as the number of police officers. If we follow this way of reasoning, decreasing the number of jailed population (giving freedom to murderers and rapists) and decreasing the number of police officers (without reciprocal decrease in the crime rates) will make the country more peaceful. Pushing this thesis to the limits, the most peaceful country will be the one where there are no prisons and no police officers. I tend to hope that one day such idyllic picture will represent the human society. Until then, however, as far as there are criminal, there should be prisons and police officers.

Even more problematic is the claim that a country becomes less peaceful when the military expenditures and the number of military personnel increase. An opposite claim may also be valid; a country that feels threatened must increase both the number of its military personnel and the military expenditures in order to protect the peace. The dispute between these two theses can go ad infinitum. The reality is that there is no strong correlation between the two factors. The increase in military expenditures also doesn't increase the threat by the military to the civil government. The most militarized country in history, the Soviet Union (almost 50% of the GDP for defense during many decades) didn't know successful military coup. On the contrary, sometimes only a small group of military is enough to put down a government. So the force measured by military personnel and weapons make a country neither more nor less peaceful.

Two last factors are particularly interesting for discussion, because 'as if' they support the philosophy of the Global Peace Index, but in reality they measure precisely the opposite trends. These factors are the military deployment within UN on non-UN missions. Clearly these deployments, at least many of them, represent transfer of military personnel across the borders. Sometimes, but not always, the official goal of protecting civilians in war-torn countries isn't achieved. In rare cases, the result may be even counterintuitive. Generally, however, these missions produce more peace than war, and what's even more certain, they usually don't decrease the level of peace in the countries that contribute to these missions. On the contrary, sending troops on UN missions usually proves that the countries sending troops are secure, so that they can 'export' this security to other countries.

Unfortunately, there is no way for us to eliminate all these false measures in order to produce independently a revised and more accurate global peace index. We hope, however, that Economist Intelligence Unit will take these flaws seriously and eliminate them for the next edition of the index.