Estimating countries’ peace index through the lens of the world news as monitored by GDELT

Abstract

Peacefulness is a principal dimension of well-being, and its measurement has lately drawn the attention of researchers and policy-makers. During the last years, novel digital data streams have drastically changed research in this field. In the current study, we exploit information extracted from Global Data on Events, Location, and Tone (GDELT) digital news database, to capture peacefulness through the Global Peace Index (GPI). Applying machine learning techniques, we demonstrate that news media attention, sentiment, and social stability from GDELT can be used as proxies for measuring GPI at a monthly level. Additionally, through the variable importance analysis, we show that each country's socio-economic, political, and military profile emerges. This could bring added value to researchers interested in "Data Science for Social Good", to policy-makers, and peacekeeping organizations since they could monitor peacefulness almost real-time, and therefore facilitate timely and more efficient policy-making.