Country threat score
Every country gets a threat score from 0 to 100, recomputed every hour. It drives the instability rankings, the fragility chart and the country panel.
The six components
- Conflict: recorded conflict deaths and armed-conflict reporting.
- Unrest: protest and riot news, internet shutdowns and energy emergencies.
- Security: exposure rather than events. Examples are holding nuclear weapons, a neighbour at war, sitting on a trade chokepoint, or, for high-latitude countries, a strong geomagnetic storm.
- Information: how well the country's news is covered: only state media, a detected blind spot, or one-sided coverage.
- Spillover: pressure from chokepoints, neighbours and the economy.
- Natural hazard: earthquakes, storms, floods, fires and other hazards.
Resilience
Each component is first reduced by the country's resilience, built from governance, development and economic indicators. Some components can be absorbed more than others. A strong state absorbs unrest, spillover and natural hazards far better than it absorbs a war, so conflict is barely reduced at all.
Earthquakes are also adjusted for how well the country builds for them. Japan's seismic impact is weighted at 0.25, Haiti's at 1.0, and most countries at 0.9.
Anchored on the worst
The score is not an average. An average would let a country at war look moderate because nothing else is wrong.
- The highest reduced component is the anchor.
- The other components, weighted and capped at 100, form the rest.
- The score is the anchor, plus the rest's share of the gap between the anchor and 100.
A country with one severe problem scores at least as high as that problem. Further problems push it higher, but never past 100.
Quadrants
The fragility chart places each country by threat against resilience:
| Lower resilience | Higher resilience | |
|---|---|---|
| Threat below 25 | Latent fragility | Stable |
| Threat 25 or more | Fragile crisis | Under stress |
Resilience counts as higher from 50. For a country whose threat is 60 or more, it needs 60, so a country at war does not read as merely under stress.
The country panel shows the same quadrants in plain words: Stable, High threat, holding (under stress), Calm but fragile (latent fragility) and High threat, fragile (fragile crisis).