Abstract/Summary

The negative peace and positive peace are the core concepts of the peace research. The Global Peace Index (GPI) and Positive Peace Index (PPI) try to measure the levels of negative and positive peace respectively and support the relevant empirical researches. However, the influences of GPI and PPI are very limited in empirical peace research. The literatures ascribed the unpopularity of the GPI to its low credibility caused by its embedded “inappropriate subjectiveness”, which is an ambiguous statement since no concrete limitations of GPI and PPI were revealed. The aim of this research is to identify the concrete limitations of the GPI and PPI methods which reduce their credibility, and then develop a new peace indexing method to solve these limitations. We dig into the methods of GPI and PPI and conclude four concrete limitations in terms of the target aggregation, the indicator validation, the indicator weighting (PPI), and the missing value estimation which can reduce the credibility of GPI and PPI. Then, we design a new peace indexing method called the automatic reflective indexing (ARI) and demonstrate its theoretically advantages by solving the concrete limitations of the methods of GPI and PPI. To evaluate the practical performance of the ARI, we use the ARI to establish specific peace indexes, the Internal Peace Index (IPI) and the External Negative Peace Index (ENPI), and then demonstrate that these indexes indeed no longer suffer from the limitations of GPI and PPI. We also illustrate that the ARI can be useful to study the causes of peace due to its SEM-based characteristics. At the end of this thesis, we summarise the contributions and limitations of the ARI and give an outlook on the future works after this research.