Such reports should drop the idea of ranking countries and instead focus on the rise or fall in per-country scores relative to their previous scores.

Whenever countries are ranked against each other, discussions inevitably focus on the relative ranks and ignore the underlying causes of any drop in scores.

When a country moves up in rank mostly because some other countries moved down, it feels odd to the people there who wonder why they ranked higher without any improvements on the ground. Nationalist governments tend to claim the higher rank is because of their policies, knowing that their people most likely won't study the changes in score components of previous years.

Worth noting that "peace" here doesn't mean "safe to live in". Instead it includes both internal conflict, but also things like military preparedness and access to heavy and nuclear weapons.

That's why unsafe but underdeveloped nations rank higher than some countries that are often considered domestically safe.

This is a nitpick but it's a bit awkward to call something "Global Peace Index" and then have it be a number where lower scores indicate more peace. It seems like it would make more sense to invert the scores.