By CLEVER ZULU –

ZAMBIA is the third peaceful nation in Africa while it occupies slot number 44 in global rankings for the 2014 Global Peace Index, according to a latest study by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP).

The study shows Mauritius and Botswana ahead of Zambia with no African country making it in the top 20 for the 2014 survey.

Of the 162 countries covered by the IEP’s latest study, just 11 countries were not involved in conflict of one kind or another.

The only countries to achieve the lowest score for all forms of conflict are Switzerland, Japan, Qatar, Mauritius, Uruguay, Chile, Botswana, Costa Rica, Vietnam, Panama and Brazil.

Even these countries are not entirely exempt from other problems that, the IEP says, could lead to conflicts further down the line.

In Brazil and Costa Rica, for instance, the level of internal conflict may be the lowest possible – but civilian access to small arms and the likelihood of violent demonstrations are worryingly high.

Switzerland is famously detached when it comes to any external conflict, and has a very low risk of internal problems of any kind – but loses a number of points on the overall index because of its proportionately huge rate of arms exports per 100,000 of the population.

The IEP says that for a country to score at the lowest level for all its indicators for conflict, it must not have been involved in any contested incompatibility that concerns a government or territory where the use of armed force between two parties, of which at least one is the government of a state, results in at least 25 battle-related deaths in a year.

Analysts from the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) must be satisfied that a given country has no conflict within its borders.

This rating on civil unrest cannot even include hidden conflict involving positional differences over definable values of national importance.

The Global Peace Index measures the latest data up to the end of the year before – meaning that the state of international conflict right now is actually even worse than the study suggests.

With the protests over the World Cup still vivid in collective memory, for instance, Brazil might find itself off the list of peaceful countries by 2015.

Syria is ranked at the bottom on the index with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), South Sudan, Somalia, Sudan and Central African Republic (CAR) among the worst performing African countries.