GLOBAL HEALTH DIPLOMACY, THE ATTRIBUTES OF PEACE, AND HEALTH INDICATORS: LOOKING AT PEACE DIFFERENTLY - A VIEW OF PEACEFUL AND NON-PEACEFUL NATIONS FROM A PUBLIC HEALTH PERSPECTIVE

Our research considered, what do we learn when we look at the infra-structures of peaceful and not-so-peaceful countries and how can we use that information to promote public health, global health diplomacy and peace? We ask not what are the negative determinates of Peace as found in the Global Peace Index (GPI) (e.g., number of homicides, prisoners, access to weapons, violent crime, volume imports of conventional weapons, terrorists acts, military expenditure, number of conflicts, etc.), but rather we consider what are the positive determinates of Peace.

We undertook to find the positive determinates of Peace through data-mining the United Nations’ (and other key and influential organizational bodies’ and think-tank’s) statistics. That is, we considered and sought to understand how do Peaceful countries (as compared to not-so-peaceful countries) rate and compare with respect to a cross-analysis of the GPI with, for instance, the components of the UN Human Poverty Index, UN Human Development Index, UN Democracy Index, Index of Economic Freedom, Child Development Index, and numerous health indicators (e.g., Life Expectancy at Birth, Infant Mortality Rate, Maternal Mortality Ratio, Total Fertility Rate, etc.).

We assert that, indeed, peaceful countries share and have in common numerous public health and societal indices - as do not-so-peaceful countries. We further assert that the lessons to be learned by our analysis will assist in promoting global public health, will be an asset in the armamentarium of global health diplomacy, and will strengthen our understanding and development of the road to peace through public health.