PTPI Perspective · August 2026

What Does the World Spend on Peace? The Question Our Budgets Cannot Answer

SIPRI estimates that the world spent US$2,887 billion (EUR 2,540 billion) on its militaries in 2025, measured at market exchange rates. Separately, the Institute for Economics and Peace estimates that peacebuilding and peacekeeping expenditure came to US$49.2 billion, just 0.5 per cent of military expenditure when both are calculated in its purchasing-power-parity methodology. The gap is startling. The story behind it is more startling still: humanity keeps meticulous accounts of what it spends preparing for war, and has no comprehensive, internationally agreed account of what it invests in peace.

📅 August 2026  ·  ⏰ 10 min read  ·  🌍 All chapters

A world that can count its weapons

Every April, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) publishes the world's military expenditure, country by country, to the nearest million dollars. The latest figures show global military spending reached US$2,887 billion (EUR 2,540 billion) in 2025, the eleventh consecutive annual increase. In 2024 it was US$2,718 billion (EUR 2,390 billion), a real-terms rise of almost 10 per cent and the steepest year-on-year increase since at least the end of the Cold War.

SIPRI calculates that 2025 spending worked out at US$352 (EUR 310) for every person on Earth. The global military burden, meaning military spending as a share of world economic output, stands at 2.5 per cent, its highest level since 2009.

These numbers are precise because governments budget for defence in detail, publish those budgets, and answer to parliaments for them. Whatever one thinks of the amounts, the accounting is serious.

Now try to count peace

Ask the equivalent question about peace and the precision vanishes. There is no global peace budget. No annual publication tells us, on an agreed basis, what humanity invested last year in preventing violence, repairing relationships and building the conditions for lasting peace.

The closest thing to an answer comes from the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), the think tank behind the Global Peace Index. Its 2026 report estimates expenditure on peacebuilding and peacekeeping at US$49.2 billion in 2025, equivalent to just 0.5 per cent of total military spending when both are measured within IEP's purchasing-power-parity methodology. The previous year's estimate was US$47.2 billion, or 0.52 per cent. Because these figures sit in a different measurement system from SIPRI's market-rate totals, this article never divides one headline number by the other; the box below explains why.

The plain meaning of IEP's ratio is this: for roughly every two hundred dollars the world devotes to its militaries, about one dollar goes to the formal work of building and keeping peace. The United Nations makes the same point about its flagship activity: peacekeeping accounts for less than half of one per cent of global military spending.

The numbers behind the headline are sobering on their own terms. The UN peacekeeping budget approved for 2025-2026 is US$5.38 billion (EUR 4.7 billion), covering twelve missions and tens of thousands of military, police and civilian personnel. Even that modest budget is not being paid in full: unpaid contributions left a shortfall of around US$2 billion (EUR 1.8 billion), and in October 2025 missions were instructed to implement contingency measures, including a 15 per cent cut in expenditure and the repatriation of a quarter of uniformed personnel. The UN Peacebuilding Fund, the organisation's main instrument for preventing conflict before it starts, recorded about US$143 million (EUR 126 million) in contributions in 2024. Over its entire twenty-year existence it has invested more than US$2 billion (EUR 1.8 billion) across more than sixty countries: less than the world spends on its militaries in a single day.

Why is there no global peace budget?

Partly because peace work is genuinely hard to count. Funding is fragmented across hundreds of governments, UN agencies, foundations and charities. Definitions differ: one organisation's peacebuilding is another's development aid or humanitarian relief. Much of the work is done by volunteers and appears in no ledger at all. And adding budgets together risks double counting, because money often passes through several hands on its way to a village dialogue or a mediation table.

This is why published comparisons conflict so wildly. Compare all military spending with one specific fund, such as the UN Peacebuilding Fund, and the ratio runs to thousands. Compare it with the broadest definitions of peace-related work and the ratio shrinks. Neither extreme is honest. The Global Peace Index estimate of roughly 0.5 per cent is the most carefully constructed comparison available, and even its authors would say it captures only the formal, measurable core of a much larger effort.

There is a further twist. What the world spends containing violence goes well beyond militaries. Within IEP's accounting of the economic impact of violence, military and internal security expenditure together make up 73 per cent of the total, covering armies but also policing, justice systems and prisons. Humanity, in other words, spends enormously on responding to and containing violence, while preventive peacebuilding receives only a small and poorly documented share of global resources.

Peacekeeping, peacemaking and peacebuilding are not the same thing

It helps to separate three words that are often blurred together. Peacekeeping is the work of standing between parties to a conflict, monitoring ceasefires and protecting civilians. Peacemaking is diplomacy: mediation and negotiation to end a conflict that has already begun. Peacebuilding is everything done to address the causes of conflict and to stop violence taking root in the first place, from rebuilding courts and schools to reconciling divided communities.

The world spends least on the third category, which the evidence suggests matters most. Research by IEP has modelled that money invested appropriately in peacebuilding could reduce the future costs of conflict at a ratio of roughly one to sixteen. That is a modelled estimate, not a guaranteed return, but the direction of the finding is consistent with common sense: prevention is cheaper than cure.

The cost of the cure, meanwhile, keeps rising. The Global Peace Index 2026 estimates the total economic impact of violence at US$21.8 trillion in 2025 within its PPP-based methodology, equal to 10.5 per cent of global economic output, or roughly US$2,657 for every person on the planet. There were 61 active state-based conflicts in 2024, the most since the end of the Second World War, and more than 181,000 people died in conflict in 2025.

The wider architecture of peace

Formal peacebuilding and peacekeeping are only the visible core. Around them stands a much larger architecture of institutions whose work makes peace possible, even where peace is not their stated mandate.

Humanitarian organisations protect people when prevention fails. The International Committee of the Red Cross spent CHF 1.92 billion (approximately US$2.2 billion / EUR 2.0 billion at 2024 average exchange rates) in 2024, principally protecting and assisting people affected by armed conflict in more than 100 countries. This work responds to war; it does not by itself prevent or resolve it, and honest accounting should not simply relabel humanitarian relief as peacebuilding.

International economic institutions build the habits of cooperation. The International Labour Organization advances social justice and dialogue between governments, employers and workers. The World Trade Organization provides agreed rules and a means of settling trade disputes with lawyers rather than gunboats. The World Customs Organization helps goods cross borders securely and predictably. None of these budgets is peace expenditure, but each reduces the friction from which conflict grows.

Researchers describe the deeper conditions as positive peace: the attitudes, institutions and structures that make societies resilient. IEP identifies eight pillars, among them well-functioning government, equitable distribution of resources, free flow of information, good relations with neighbours and low levels of corruption. Investment in education, health, the rule of law and anti-corruption is, in this sense, peace investment, even though none of it is labelled as such. This is one more reason a single global peace budget is so hard to construct: peace is built by many sectors, not by peace ministries alone.

Faith communities are among the most consistent peace actors at local level, through interfaith dialogue, education, reconciliation and trusted relationships that outlast governments. The Baha'i community, to take one example raised by our members, treats the unity of humanity as a core teaching and runs education and community-building programmes on every continent. Yet religious bodies rarely separate peace expenditure from worship, education, relief and administration, so their contribution belongs in this article as documented programmes and case studies, not as budget lines.

Convening bodies such as the World Economic Forum bring governments, companies and civic leaders into the same room. Some of that convening supports dialogue. Businesses themselves, operating in fragile places, can either fuel conflict or promote stability through jobs, ethical supply chains and community investment. It would nonetheless stretch the definition beyond usefulness to count such organisations as peace institutions.

A fair map of all this looks less like a single number and more like concentric layers:

Layer	What belongs here	How this article treats it
Direct peace investment	Mediation, conflict prevention, reconciliation, peace education, disarmament, post-conflict institution building	Included in the core comparison
Peace operations	UN and regional peacekeeping, civilian protection, monitoring missions	Shown separately, because some of this spending covers uniformed personnel
Humanitarian protection	ICRC, IFRC, UN humanitarian agencies, humanitarian NGOs	Recognised as essential, but not all labelled peacebuilding
Foundations of positive peace	Justice, accountable government, education, equality, decent work, social protection, human rights	Discussed as enabling conditions, without adding entire budgets
Civic infrastructure	PTPI, Scouting, youth groups, cultural exchange, volunteering, community dialogue	Scale and value demonstrated separately
Economic cooperation	ILO, WTO, WCO, parts of the UN system, regional organisations	Contribution explained, whole budgets not counted as peace expenditure
Convening and influence	World Economic Forum, foundations, business networks	Mentioned selectively, not treated as formal peace institutions
Faith-based action	Interfaith dialogue, mediation, reconciliation, humanitarian service, local trust building	Included through documented programmes, not the full spending of religious bodies

The invisible contribution

The deepest layer is the one no ledger captures: ordinary people building the relationships that make dehumanisation harder.

Think of it as social infrastructure. Just as roads and ports are infrastructure for trade, trust and relationships are infrastructure for peace. Defence budgets capitalise their infrastructure: bases, hardware, personnel. Nobody capitalises the thousands of local dialogues, youth exchanges, twin-town visits and interfaith meetings that happen every day. That asymmetry is the heart of the problem this article describes.

World Scouting reaches tens of millions of young people, supported by millions of adult volunteers, and has recorded more than two billion hours of community service through initiatives linked to the Sustainable Development Goals and its Messengers of Peace programme. Those hours accumulated over many years and include environmental and humanitarian work as well as peace education, so they should not be casually converted into an annual peace budget. What they demonstrate is civic capacity on an enormous scale.

People to People International belongs in this same layer. For nearly seventy years, since President Eisenhower founded the organisation in 1956 on the conviction that peace is made by people and not only by governments, PTPI members have hosted strangers, exchanged students, sustained friendships across borders and kept talking when governments stopped. As PTPI approaches its seventieth anniversary on 11 September 2026, none of that work appears in any peace budget. All of it is peace infrastructure.

New forms of this work are emerging that budgets have not yet caught up with. Online misinformation and hate speech fuel real-world violence, so efforts to counter disinformation, teach media literacy and build cross-cultural dialogue in digital spaces are becoming a form of peacebuilding in their own right. Climate stress, from drought to flooding to competition for water, increasingly acts as a conflict multiplier, which means investment in climate resilience is often, quietly, investment in peace as well. Neither appears in any peace account.

Women's groups, youth peacebuilders, teachers, twin-town committees and community volunteers do the same work in thousands of places. Their common characteristic is that they are financially invisible: fragmented, underfunded, volunteered, and absent from every comparison of what the world spends on war and peace.

What should count?

Not everything. The temptation, once one starts looking, is to declare every good thing a form of peace spending until the category means nothing. Education, justice and decent work are foundations of positive peace, and they deserve investment in their own right. But adding the world's entire education budget to a peace total would mislead readers and hand critics an easy target.

Nor should the article's argument caricature the other side of the ledger. Defence budgets pay for personnel, deterrence, territorial protection, cyber security, disaster response and, in some cases, peace support operations. In some circumstances credible defence protects people and helps prevent aggression. Peace spending is not the opposite of defence; it is the complement that makes defence less likely to be needed. The point is not that all military spending is waste. The point is an asymmetry of attention: governments maintain detailed, comparable, regularly updated accounts of military expenditure, and humanity has no comprehensive, internationally agreed account of what it invests in preventing violence and building the conditions for lasting peace.

A proposal: an Investment in Peace Account

What gets measured gets managed. PTPI therefore proposes a simple idea: governments and international organisations should publish a common Investment in Peace Account alongside their military expenditure data.

It would not need to be invented from nothing. A body such as the UN Statistical Commission, drawing on the methodological work of institutes like IEP, could define common categories, and national statistical offices could report annually, exactly as they already report military expenditure. The account would cover a deliberately narrow, defensible core: development assistance for conflict prevention, mediation and reconciliation; UN and regional peace operations; national budgets for civilian conflict resolution, peace education and post-conflict recovery; and major foundation grants explicitly dedicated to peacebuilding. A group of willing countries could pilot the account for a trial year and publish the results.

Such an account would not by itself add a single euro to peace work. It would do something prior and necessary: make the current imbalance visible, comparable and impossible to ignore. It took decades of patient statistical work to make military spending as transparent as it is today. Peace deserves the same seriousness.

Until then, every citizen can hold one comparison in mind. For roughly every two hundred dollars the world devotes to its militaries, about one dollar goes to the formal work of building and keeping peace. And a further fact fits in no table at all: much of what actually keeps the peace, in classrooms and living rooms and town halls across the world, costs almost nothing and is counted nowhere.

So here is something practical any reader can do. Ask the question. Write to your foreign ministry, your parliamentarian, your mayor: what does our country spend on peace, and can you show me the account? The question is polite, reasonable and surprisingly hard to answer. That is exactly why it is worth asking.

Peace is not free, passive or accidental. It is built, person by person, and it is time the world learned to count it.