Methodology

The topics covered in this report reflect protection priorities identified by CIVIC through strategic consultation processes with experts and analysis of datasets measuring different aspects of protection, such as civilian fatalities and casualties, violations against children, sexual violence, and displacement, among many others. However, the extent of the protection threats civilians faced in 2023 was such that CIVIC was unable to dedicate content to all of the direct and indirect harm and violence (and/or threats thereof) that women, men, girls, and boys suffered throughout the year. Although not able to be fully comprehensive, the report seeks to demonstrate the human cost of conflict and amplify the experiences of civilians living in situations of conflict and extreme violence.

Unless directly stated otherwise, all conclusions put forward in this report are based on triangulated primary data (at least three independent sources), secondary data sources assessed as highly credible, or a combination of primary and secondary data sources. In most cases, CIVIC has protected the identity of primary sources by anonymizing interviews. However, we have provided other information in the report citations that is relevant for readers, including the type of stakeholder interviewed, the month and year interviews took place, and the location of interviews as long as such information was assessed to not compromise the identity or security of interview participants.

To identify which indicators to include in CIVIC’s Civilian Protection Index, we reviewed existing global indexes related to peace and security, consulted internally across CIVIC’s staff, consulted externally with members of an informal NGO working group on the protection of civilians, and relied on the expertise of Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) staff. The index includes 15 indicators and covers 163 countries, including all countries with populations exceeding 1 million. It thus represents 99.7 percent of the world’s population. The indicators included in the index are as follows:

The following countries are covered by the index:

All datasets have limitations. A number of the datasets included, such as those rating trust in institutions, rely on survey data and are therefore subjective. In such surveys, respondents have been known to rate their approval lower if they have higher expectations of their national institutions. This tendency creates some challenges for comparing survey results across countries. Moreover, there were many factors that CIVIC would have wanted to include in a comprehensive measure of protection that it could not, as no reliable dataset covering a significant percentage of the world’s countries exists. Such factors include attacks against infrastructure critical to the civilian population and grave violations committed against children. Indeed, there is significant room for improvement in terms of datasets that measure, directly and indirectly, protection-related concerns. CIVIC hopes to work with other organizations to help fill these gaps in the future, and we will improve the Civilian Protection Index as additional data becomes available to do so.

All the indicators incorporated in the index use recently updated data, with one exception: the Small Arms Survey dataset on firearm ownership. However, these numbers are not believed to change significantly from year to year. For most countries and indicators, data were available. On rare occasions where data were not available for a specific country, regional averages were used. This is a common and well‐established practice utilized in all of the reports and indices generated by the IEP. Despite these limitations, the data included in this index represent the best available sources with sufficient country coverage.

The indicator data were transformed in some ways to allow for more accurate comparisons between countries. “Civilian casualties,” “conflict internal displacement,” “killed journalists,” and “sexual violence victims” were calculated per 100,000 people in the country. Likewise, “peacebuilding aid receipt” was calculated per capita. Lastly, some indicators with heavily skewed distributions were log‐transformed, including “civilian casualties,” “conflict internal displacement,” “firearms per 100,” and “peacebuilding aid receipt”). Log‐transforming a skewed indicator reduces the impact of outliers, normalizes the distribution, and stabilizes variance, making statistical analysis more robust and reliable.

To aggregate the incommensurable indicators into a single Civilian Protection Index, all indicators have been standardized (normalized). Each data point is normalized to a scale from 0 to 1, where 1 represents the best performance and 0 represents the poorest performance. For example, a score of 1 in “Harassment of Journalists” indicates the lowest level of journalist harassment, while a score of 0 indicates the highest level of harassment of journalists. Similarly, a score of 1 in “Freedom of Expression” signifies the highest level of freedom of expression, whereas a score of 0 denotes the lowest level of freedom of expression.

Not all indicators were given equal weight in the index. CIVIC grouped indicators into three categories: those measuring violence directly, those indirectly measuring security, and those measuring the protective environment. Measures of direct violence were given a relative weight of 2, those indirectly measuring security were assigned a weight of 1.5, and those measuring a protective environment were assigned a weight of 1. To break countries into different protection categories, CIVIC set ranges based on the banded Civilian Protection Index score of each country. The countries had a range of scores from 0.401 to 0.863. All countries below 0.6 were considered to be facing the poorest protection situation, while all those above 0.8 were determined to have the highest protection situation, with additional protection categories covering 0.05 increments between 0.6 and 0.8.

The IEP also developed a Conflict Media Coverage Index for CIVIC to gauge the media attention accorded to different contexts experiencing war and extreme levels of violence. To construct the index, the number of conflict‐related media articles was divided by the number of civilian casualties for each country. The dataset on conflict-related media articles included articles published in 65 different languages. In 2023, 55 countries globally recorded conflict‐related civilian casualties exceeding 25 people, a threshold based on the Uppsala Conflict Data Program’s definition of conflict. Due to significant skew in the data, values were first log transformed and then standardized on a scale from 0 to 100. A score of 0 represents minimal media coverage, and a score of 100 indicates the highest amount of media coverage. The IEP also looked more broadly at the number of media articles related to all forms of violence as compared to civilian casualties but found the rankings for this metric to be almost identical to those of the Conflict Media Coverage Index.

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