The BICC Global Militarization Index (GMI)
For the past 15 years, the main focus of BICC has been on conducting applied research with regard to military capacities, structures and resources. In general, we have found that the size and composition of a state’s military apparatus may have a major impact on its human and economic development as well as on overall levels of violence or violent conflict—both internally and externally. The Global Militarization Index (GMI), presented here for the first time, will be helpful to all those who wish to explore this relation further.
Most fundamentally, it represents the relative weight and importance of the military apparatus of a state in relation to society as a whole. Militarization is thus defined, in a narrow sense, as the resources and capacities available to a state’s armed forces.
The GMI analyses:
- military spending in relation to GDP and health services,
- the ratio of (para)military personnel, reserve forces, and physicians in relation to total population
- heavy weapons (armoured vehicles, artillery, combat aircraft and major fighting ships) in relation to population
Moreover, unlike most other governance indexes the GMI does not represent a normative ranking of states. In and by itself, militarization is therefore neither ‘good’ nor ‘bad’.
However, a high score on the GMI can, of course, still point to serious governance shortcomings. A case in point is Eritrea—by all means the most militarized country in the world, spending more than 20 percent of its GDP on the armed forces and, by way of comparison, only 3.7 percent on public health services.
Conversely, low levels of militarization could also be highly problematic. As is apparent from the GMI, many countries with a low score are so-called weak or fragile states, unable or unwilling to successfully enforce and uphold a monopoly of violence within their territories. A weak public security sector may well prompt non-state armed groups to pursue economic objectives by violent means or even directly challenge the regime for political power. Indeed, it seems that many countries with a low ranking on the GMI experience high levels of internal unrest and violence.
It is thus that we hope the GMI, in combination with other indices as well as country-specific information, will be of valuable assistance to both policy-relevant country assessments and further research in the field of security governance.
For a detailled description of the GMI please refer to the chapter in BICC's Annual Report 2008/2009.
You can also have a direct look at the ranking table as well as the GMI Worldmap (pdf).