By Steve Killelea

I have just finished reading your excellent book from beginning to end and it is a really important piece of work.   I am very impressed with what you have achieved and I entirely agree with the approach that you have taken.  The book and the ideas in it are both inspirational and foundational.  You demonstrate an infectious passion for humanity and the world we live in, a developed understanding of how individuals and societies function and a clear direction of travel to a better and more sustainable future.

The work of the Institute for Economics and Peace and its flagship publications, most notably the Global Peace Index, the Positive Peace Reports, and the Global Terrorism Index, is now acknowledged worldwide amongst academics, practitioners and policy makers as the gold standard for measuring and analysing peace. This book tells the remarkable and inspirational story of the man whose vision and genius for innovation created this shift in peace thinking and practice. Standing in the great tradition of entrepreneurs who have committed their energy and resources to world peace, Killelea has reactivated the idea of positive peace and provided a robust and context sensitive methodology through which it can be defined, cultivated and implemented.

This book should be mandatory reading for all politicians, judicial leaders, senior government and health officials, and police and military officers who have prime responsibility to protect their fellow citizens from conflicts, pandemics, injustice, and natural and man-made disasters.  The book should be actively embraced and promoted by all religious, business and community leaders, and it should be read by school children and those undergoing tertiary education so that they can better inform their elders. Why? Because in 12 chapters Steve Killelea charts the current state of world peace - and lack of it - and through the IEP's factual and unbiased measurement and economic analysis using 'systems thinking' provides a sensible and achievable roadmap for achieving Positive Peace in a chaotic and dangerous world.

Over fifteen years, I have watched Steve Killelea’s global reputation as an expert on peace grow along with that of his Institute for Economics and Peace. In this excellent book, he invites the reader to join him on a personal journey of learning about how to understand peace as more than the absence of conflict. The result is compelling advocacy for Positive Peace. Convincingly he unveils the data proving that Positive Peace is associated with many social characteristics that are considered desirable, including stronger economic outcomes, higher resilience, better measures of well-being, higher levels of inclusiveness and more sustainable environmental performance; in other words, an optimal environment in which human potential can flourish. His research, data analysis and recommendations merit attention and should give policy makers food for thought in wake of the Coronavirus pandemic.