The Balkan Peace Index: Three Years of Measuring Peace

The Balkan Peace Index (BPI) was created in 2022 as part of the research project entitled Monitoring and Indexing Peace and Security in the Western Balkans (MIND). It emerged in response to critiques of universal peace measurements that fail to consider local contexts, such as the Global Peace Index (Džuverović 2023; Tepšić 2024). BPI sought to address these theoretical and methodological issues by implementing a ‘local turn’ in peace measurement and indexing (Džuverović 2024). Empirically, it focused on accurately assessing the quality of peace in the Western Balkans, a region still experiencing considerable political instability several decades after the so-called Yugoslav wars (1991–2001). In addition to integrating ‘local voices’, a key innovation of BPI is its use of an algorithmic approach called Decision Expert Model (DEX) (Džuverović et al. 2024b).