Queen’s University Belfast’s Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice hosted the launch of the first Northern Ireland Peace Index (NIPI). The Index is the result of a partnership between QUB and the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), an independent, non-partisan global think tank headquartered in Sydney. Funded by UKRI through the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the investigators are Dr Andrew Thomson and Professor Dominic Bryan. The IEP team was led by Dr Paulina Pijacka and Dr David Hammond, with Brett Savill, IEP’s Chief Operating Officer, presenting the findings on the day.

The NIPI is the first sustained attempt to measure peace in Northern Ireland empirically across two complementary frameworks: negative peace — the absence of violence and the fear of violence — and Positive Peace, defined as the attitudes, institutions, and structures that create and sustain peaceful societies over the long term. The Index covers the period 2019 to 2025 and is reported both at Northern Ireland level and across all eleven Local Government Districts (LGDs), with comparison points against the rest of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. A companion practitioner’s toolkit was published alongside the report.

Headline findings

The central finding of the Index is stark. Negative peace in Northern Ireland improved 10.7 per cent between 2019 and 2025 — the composite score falling from 2.14 to 1.91 (where a lower score is better), with the steepest gains in the most recent two years. Five of the six negative peace indicators improved: homicide fell 48% and paramilitary activity dropped 45% per cent over the period. The one exception was hate crime, which rose over 21% — though Savill noted that its composition has shifted, with a doubling of racially motivated incidents accompanied by a decline in sectarian violence.

Positive Peace, by contrast, improved by just 1% over the same window — from 2.48 to 2.45 on IEP’s 1-to-5 scale. The gap between the two trajectories is the report’s most important message. As Thomson put it in his introduction, drawing on Johan Galtung’s foundational analogy: not being sick does not mean being healthy. The relative absence of violence is consolidating faster than the attitudes, institutions, and structures meant to sustain peace.

The eight pillars of Positive Peace, adapted from IEP’s global framework for the Northern Ireland context, tell a mixed story. Four improved since 2019: 

• Free Flow of Information (driven by a 57% improvement in gigabit-capable broadband)
• Acceptance of the Rights of Others
• Sound Business Environment, and 
• Equitable Distribution of Resources. 

Four deteriorated: 

• High Levels of Human Capital (driven by a 34% per cent fall in R&D spending as a share of GDP, concentrated in a small number of foreign multinationals)
• Well-functioning Government (where social housing processing fell sharply, with the waiting list rising 30% per cent)
• Good Relations with Neighbours (adapted here to capture inter-community relations within Northern Ireland) and 
• Trust in Institutions.

The trust findings drew particular attention. Confidence in the justice system deteriorated almost 24% over the period; favourability towards the other community fell from 83% to 71%, a 40% deterioration on the normalised score. Savill’s description of Northern Ireland’s institutions as “functional but not effective” captured the paradox: structures that have succeeded in ending sustained political violence have not generated the public confidence that would make that peace self-sustaining.

Local Government Districts

At the LGD level, the Index reveals a pattern that defies simple interpretation: a strong Positive Peace position does not guarantee a strong negative peace position, and vice versa. 

Belfast records the strongest aggregate Positive Peace position among the eleven districts — and the highest concentration of recorded violence, with hate crime three times the Northern Ireland average, public disorder and weapon crime double the average, and paramilitary activity 65%. Derry and Strabane, by contrast, records the weakest Positive Peace position but has seen some of the largest improvements in violence-related indicators since 2019. The two dimensions can move independently, and a council’s standing on one is not a reliable guide to its standing on the other.

Positive Peace, the Programme for Government, and the policy gap

Bryan’s discussion framing offered a sharper political context. He noted that the word “peace” appears twelve times in the current Programme for Government — Our Plan: Doing What Matters Most, published in February 2025 — but is never defined and is never linked to a specific cross-governmental strategy. He described it as a “placeholder without any strategic explanation or objective”. He had never, he said, heard a politician deliver a speech about Northern Ireland quite like Savill’s presentation: a health check of where Northern Ireland actually is, “because there was, in some senses, no green and orange politics in all of that.”

Bryan characterised the wider peace process as “ad hoc”: assembled under pressure, bolted together agreement by agreement, without any major review of its structures and institutions — partly, he suggested, because any such review risks collapse. The good relations policy framework, last significantly updated in 2013 with Together: Building a United Community, is overdue for renewal, and Bryan argued that good relations had been over-pressured to deliver what is in reality a systems problem requiring action across health, housing, education, and economic development simultaneously.

Discussion and Questions

The Q&A opened with a challenge on the “Free Flow of Information” pillar — specifically, who determines what constitutes a “right decision” when communities disagree, citing the Northern Ireland flags dispute and Iceland’s EU referendum as examples of cases where collective decisions might be viewed as “wrong” by external observers. Savill was clear that the report provides data, not answers: the framework is designed to shed light on where conditions are improving or deteriorating, and to allow those on the ground to draw their own conclusions and re-prioritise accordingly.

Katy Radford asked why the creative industries were not among the eight pillars. Savill explained that the pillars were derived statistically from correlating 50,000 social development indicators across 163 countries, and that arts, like gender, had not emerged as an independent pillar in that analysis — though Thomson acknowledged that things “around the edges”, including arts and the environment, are fundamentally important and that local input is needed to make the framework fully relevant to Northern Ireland’s context.

Professor Adrian Guelke raised two points: that comparing Northern Ireland with the rest of the United Kingdom as a whole is distorted by London’s dominance, and that a comparison with Scotland and Wales as fellow devolved regions would be more illuminating; and that Brexit had been “a great destroyer of trust” in Northern Ireland, an external factor with clear implications for the index’s trust findings. Savill agreed on both counts, noting that Northern Ireland had been “hammered” by Brexit and the five-year uncertainty over border arrangements, and committed to examining the Scotland and Wales comparison in future iterations.

Declan McGarrigle of the Special EU Programmes Body observed that much of the Index’s direction of travel reinforces the approach taken by the EU PEACE PLUS programme, which has moved beyond traditional good relations activity to a broader, forward-looking frame encompassing R&D, business development, and transport infrastructure.

On the accountability dimension of the Index, I remarked that Shared Future News published an analysis of the Northern Ireland Executive’s Programme for Government Wellbeing Framework — itself built on outcomes-based accountability principles and aligned with IEP’s Positive Peace pillars — arguing that the framework gave journalists a government-sanctioned, data-grounded mechanism to hold power to account. The disappointment at the time was the limited uptake: the framework had not been widely used by journalists as the accountability tool it could be. My question for the panel was the same applied to the NIPI: given that the Index provides an even more rigorously derived empirical framework, how might accountability become part of the calculus of both the electorate and the journalists who cover Northern Ireland’s politics?

Bryan responded directly. He described the moment that morning when Andrew Thomson appeared on Good Morning Ulster with all the report’s material ready to deploy — only for the first question to be about Drumcree. “It is frustrating that journalists don’t always pick up,” he said. (However, Bryan and Savill later appeared on BBC Radio Ulster Talkback with William Crawley to discuss the report further.) Bryan expressed hope, however, that the report would have what he called a “long tail”. He drew on his experience chairing the Flags, Identity, Culture and Tradition Commission, whose report — agreed by all five political parties — had also been left on the shelf in certain respects, but had continued to be cited whenever related issues arose in the media. Bryan hoped the same would be true of the NIPI: that as elections approached, and as politicians were challenged on what they meant when they used the word “peace”, the Index would be the document to hand.

Thomson added that the NIPI’s evidence base offers something distinct from the Programme for Government Wellbeing Framework: not an outcomes-based measure of government objectives, but an independently derived, statistically grounded alternative lens on what actually sustains peace — one that politicians and journalists can use to ask better-calibrated questions. 

Savill offered two international comparisons. In Mexico, where IEP has published a state-level peace index for a decade, uptake at federal level was slow until one year Mexico performed well, allowing the government to issue a press release: the lesson being that “sometimes a little bit of honey goes further than a bit of lemon juice”, and that building on demonstrated successes may be more effective than leading with deficits. The more ambitious model, he suggested, is the Philippines, where peace reporting sits directly under the president, every government department is required to produce a peace plan, and every tertiary student undertakes some form of peace training as part of their education.

Graínne Kelly of Ulster University picked up this point from a research-translation perspective, observing that academics are “terrible” at making complex work digestible for civil servants and politicians, and that research funders rarely allow enough time at the close of large projects for the relationship-building that meaningful policy translation requires. She encouraged the team to meet civil servants and politicians directly, and asked whether IEP had seen successful translation in other countries. Savill’s answer, drawing on Pascal’s aphorism about the difficulty of writing a short letter, was candid: the team needed to invest more time in message delivery than in report-writing, because no politician was likely to wade through a 65-page document.

Thomson drew the event to a close by thanking attendees and inviting continued conversations over lunch. The Northern Ireland Peace Index 2026 is available at visionofhumanity.org.

Cross-published at Mr Ulster.