Why Some Countries Are Becoming More Peaceful Against the Odds

In its inaugural year, the Annual GPA Peace Index 2025 delivered a sober, even alarming, assessment of global stability. The report confirms that conflict deaths are at a 25-year high, the pace of peace agreements has slowed to a quarter-century low, and the insidious rise of cyber-kinetic warfare is fundamentally reshaping the face of global conflict. It would be easy to conclude that the world is simply on an irreversible downhill slide toward instability.

But that is not the whole story.

Amidst the darkness, the Index reveals a beacon of hope: a surprising cohort of countries that have defied the global trend and registered significant improvements in their peace scores. These nations, often overshadowed by larger conflicts, prove that progress is not only possible but is actively being achieved through persistent, localized, and pragmatic efforts.

The leaders of this cohort, singled out for their impressive gains, include Colombia, Uzbekistan, Angola, and Armenia, among others. These success stories offer invaluable, counter-intuitive lessons for a world obsessed with great-power diplomacy and high-stakes geopolitics. They show that while world leaders are struggling to draft comprehensive international treaties, peace is quietly being built from the ground up, in meeting rooms, at border crossings, and in local communities.

The Quiet Winners: Redefining Peace Progress

The countries showing the most improvement—what the GPA Index classifies as the “Top 20 Countries Showing Improvement”—share a common thread: they have prioritized internal stability and regional diplomacy over external alignment or high-profile international intervention. Their progress suggests that the inertia of violence can be overcome through specific, measurable, and committed policy shifts.

These improvements say three crucial things about the current state of global peace efforts:

1. Resilience of Local Peacebuilding: Even after years of intractable violence, local agreements and community-led reconciliation can still deliver results that central governments often fail to achieve.

2. The Power of Pragmatic Transitions: Meaningful political transitions and reforms, even those that are domestically messy, can provide the necessary catalyst for internal de-escalation.

3. Regional Solutions Over Great Power Gridlock: When countries prioritize pragmatic cooperation with immediate neighbors, they can resolve disputes and build stability faster than waiting for consensus among permanent members of the UN Security Council.

These countries are not merely resting in a period of calm; they are actively peace-engineering solutions tailored to their unique, complex histories.

Colombia: The Enduring Power of Grassroots Agreements

Colombia’s sustained progress on the GPA Index stands as a powerful testament to the resilience of localized, grassroots peacebuilding, even in the face of ongoing political polarization. The national peace accord signed in 2016 was a landmark achievement, but the subsequent peace has been secured not just by politicians in Bogotá, but by activists and communities in rural areas.¹

Colombia’s success is rooted in the persistence of what the Index would categorize as local peacebuilding efforts. This includes:

• Implementation of Rural Reform: Focusing on land titling and infrastructure investment in previously conflict-ridden zones, which addresses the root causes of civil unrest.

• Localized Reintegration Programs: Decentralized efforts to reintegrate former combatants into civilian life through economic projects and community support.

• Truth and Justice Initiatives: The continuation of transitional justice mechanisms, such as the Special Jurisdiction for Peace (JEP), which provides a mechanism for accountability and reconciliation that strengthens the rule of law.

Where great-power interventions often fail due to a lack of local context and ownership, Colombia demonstrates that a sustainable peace is one that is internalized and championed by the citizens most affected by the conflict. It is a slow, difficult process, but the improvements in the GPA Index show that the peace is deepening, transforming from a fragile agreement into a self-sustaining societal commitment.

Uzbekistan and Angola: Case Studies in Regional Cooperation

The improving metrics of countries like Uzbekistan and Angola offer vital lessons on the success of regional cooperation and political transitions. These nations show that breakthroughs in peace can come not from the battlefield, but from the diplomatic table and the ballot box.

The Central Asian Model: Uzbekistan

Uzbekistan’s dramatic shift in the Index is a direct result of a calculated diplomatic pivot following a major political transition. For years, Central Asia was plagued by frozen conflicts, tense border disputes, and economic nationalism. Under new leadership, Uzbekistan consciously chose a path of regional rapprochement. This involved:

• Resolving Border Disputes: Actively demarcating and resolving long-standing, often violent, border disagreements with neighbors like Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.²

• Boosting Cross-Border Trade and Connectivity: Reopening economic pathways and establishing common markets, which immediately raises the cost of conflict for all parties.

This Central Asian model provides a clear blueprint: mutual economic and security interests, when pragmatically pursued, are a far more reliable foundation for peace than ideological alignment or external security guarantees. Uzbekistan’s stabilization has ripple effects, contributing to the overall peace scores of the entire region.

The African Diplomatic Pivot: Angola

Angola’s improvement is a dual success story of internal political transition and external diplomatic influence. Domestically, the political shift has ushered in a period of reduced government violence and increased political freedoms, contributing directly to a higher peace score.

Crucially, Angola has leveraged this stability to become a constructive regional power, prioritizing diplomacy in the volatile Great Lakes region.³ By taking a leading role in mediating the complex, decades-long conflict between the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Rwanda, Angola is actively exporting stability. Its commitment demonstrates that a nation, having stabilized its own domestic environment through political transition, can then use its sovereign capacity to support peace elsewhere—succeeding where great powers, often burdened by their own geopolitical interests, frequently hesitate or fail.

Armenia: The Necessity of Post-Conflict Stabilization

Armenia’s improvement, while perhaps the most fragile of the group due to recent conflicts, highlights the difficult but necessary process of post-conflict political stabilization. Its upward trajectory in the Index is not a celebration of victory, but a recognition of a constrained political environment choosing stability and consolidation over renewed, high-intensity conflict.

The lesson here is profound: after a devastating war, a measured political transition focused on internal institutional resilience—even under duress—can prevent a rapid descent back into violence. It proves that political transitions, while never easy, are often the only mechanism capable of shifting a nation from a war footing to a governance footing.

Lessons for Larger Conflicts: A Blueprint for the Future

The success stories of Colombia, Uzbekistan, Angola, and Armenia offer a unified set of lessons for the world’s enduring conflicts, from Ukraine to the Middle East, where great power negotiations have repeatedly failed:

These countries demonstrate that peace is an active process, not a final destination. It is built in increments—a community reconciliation here, a border agreement there, a political reform at home.

The Global Peace Alliance Index serves as a vital tool not just for sounding alarms, but for highlighting what is actually working in the pursuit of peace. We invite policymakers, analysts, and readers to look past the overwhelming headlines of global decline and study the improvement metrics and case studies in this report. The answers to a more peaceful world are not always found in the war rooms of the world’s major capitals, but often in the quiet, persistent efforts of nations determined to build a better future against the odds.

Read the full report and study the success stories in detail at https://shorturl.at/xYhpB.