Will State of Happiness Assure Global Peace?

Abstract

Happiness has gone from being an abstract concept at the individual level to becoming one of the standards considered for quality of life and one of the ultimate goals of peacebuilding. While Global Peace Index (GPI) measures how peaceful nations are and World Happiness Index (WHI) measures how happy their citizens are, these two indices do not necessarily coincide in their results. This research sought to determine the commonalities between countries with high levels of happiness but are low in global state of peace. The values used were from published indices, namely, the World Happiness Report and the Global Peace Index. These were analyzed using nominal logistic regression in order to find the relationship between these variables. Findings suggest that there is a significant correlation between levels of peace and happiness. However, it also found that there were 10 countries that diverged from this trend. Upon further analysis of indicators of each index, results indicated that citizens in these countries have strong social support that enabled them to consider themselves happy despite the low state of peace in their respective nations, the factors of which vary from region to region and country to country.