Global Peacefulness is Deteriorating, Driven by the Great Fragmentation and Rising Drone Use
The world is struggling with the weight of a record-number of conflicts that are increasingly interconnected, driven by technology use, and difficult to resolve, according to a global analysis released this week.
The 2026 Global Peace Index, published annually by the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), found that global peacefulness deteriorated for the 12th consecutive year as the number of active, state-based conflicts reached 61—the highest since the end of World War II. The index also tracked a six-fold increase in internal conflict deaths since 2007, from 29,000 to more than 181,000 in 2025. The number of countries recording 1,000 or more deaths from conflict—20—also reached its highest since the index was first published in 2006.
There are two major trends that are driving this peace deterioration, says Thomas Morgan, IEP chief research officer and author of the report. The first is what he calls the Great Fragmentation, an increased Superpower competition where the traditional great powers—particularly in Europe—are retreating and institutional action, like the United Nations’ peacekeeping efforts, faces increasing friction.
The index assessed that with the diminishment of multilateral institutions like the UN and the weakening of great power consensus, the historical mechanisms for ending wars are failing. The number of conflicts that ended in peace agreements dropped to just 4 percent during the last decade, compared to 23 percent in the 1970s.
Local wars are becoming less isolated with more parties involved—feeding into broader regional instability fueled by parties that are self-financing via illicit economies in drugs, trafficking, precious metals, and more. These factors make conflict more difficult to end, creating the risk of conflict spreading and creating “conflict clusters,” according to the index.
This dynamic is resulting in an increase in “low activity termination” conflicts, Morgan says, in an interview with Security Management. “What that means is there’s no formal end to the conflict. No peace agreement is signed. No side essentially declares victory. They just drop under the threshold of deaths to be counted as a conflict—less than 25 deaths. All of the underlying drivers and grievances and conditions are still present.”
Often this results in these conflicts reactivating, such as with Boko Haram in Nigeria in 2009 which resurged in 2011 and 2012. The rise in low activity terminations reflects the changing nature of conflict, Morgan adds, as well as the inability of multilateral institutions to end conflict because of sponsorship by external parties.
The second factor behind the continuing peace deterioration around the world is the increasing use of technology in warfare. Morgan says this is demonstrated by the huge rise in drone strikes, the proliferation of drones around the world, and the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) autonomous weapon systems in conflict.
IEP recorded 364 drone strikes in 2018, which rose to more than 42,000 in 2025. Drone activity in Ukraine and Russia is behind most of this surge, with Ukraine accounting for nearly 57 percent of all drone strike events and Russia accounting for 30.6 percent in 2025.
“Taken together, the Russia-Ukraine war therefore accounts for roughly four out of every five drone strikes recorded worldwide since 2018,” the index assessed.
Ukraine has also taken significant steps to increase its drone procurement and production. Then Ukrainian Defense Minister Denys Shmyhal said in December 2025 that the country’s Defense Procurement Agency had supplied 2.4 million first-person-view drones in one year. It was also reported to produce as many as 5 million drones in 2025, from more than 500 Ukrainian manufacturers that are part of the Brave1 defense-tech accelerator.
Drone strikes in the Russia-Ukraine war are increasingly effective because they’re now using machine vision and AI in their final phases.
“The Saker Scout, approved for armed forces use in September 2023, can identify 64 categories of Russian military equipment and run autonomous strikes after losing GPS or radio link,” the index said. “It works with Delta, Ukraine’s NATO-compatible situational-awareness platform, and GIS Arta, the artillery-fire-control system credited with cutting target-to-fire times from roughly 20 minutes to under 1 minute.
“A growing fleet of unmanned ground systems, including the Lyut mini-tank, the Termit modular ground vehicle, and the DevDroid family, now field AI-assisted target detection alongside conventional teleoperation,” the index continued. “Brave1 has also incubated Griselda, an intelligence-fusion platform that combines open-source, signals, and battlefield reporting for commanders.”
On the opposing side, Russia is using V2U loitering munitions with a Nvidia Jeston Orin chip to autonomously find and select targets without being linked to an operator after becoming airborne. IEP assessed that Russia is probably fielding fully autonomous combat drones, despite civilian casualties. In May 2025, for instance, “seven V2U units reportedly broke off a planned mission, autonomously formed a holding pattern, and coordinated attacks on a column of vehicles and civilians,” according to the index.
Morgan adds that drones are also being used for secondary military operations—reconnaissance, scouting, and tracking of troop movements. Ukraine has been the testing ground for this activity, but IEP has tracked about 565 different groups that are now using drones. Rebels in Myanmar, cartels in Mexico, and criminal groups in Colombia have all used drones during the past year.
“Even though Ukraine is the testing ground, it’s where most of the action is happening on that front, it’s proliferated essentially to every continent now,” Morgan says.
The IEP also looked at how Israel has AI-driven cognitive targeting and shortened the human review period—in some cases down to just 20 seconds—and how AI is changing the kill chain compression (the time between target selection and strike execution).
“If you’re talking about cruise missiles in the 1990s, it’s a day-long process to identify the target, launch the missile,” Morgan says. “With the most advanced systems like the V2U system in the Ukraine-Russia conflict, 5 seconds between a target being identified to the strike being executed.
“This raises so many questions around accountability, about what the error rate might be, who is responsible ultimately for an autonomous weapon system, if something goes wrong, if a civilian is targeted, and so on,” Morgan continues.
With these weapons becoming increasingly widespread and no incentive to stop developing them, intervention in the conflict solving process is becoming even more important, he adds. Theaters where these technologies are deployed now are more likely to have a stalemate situation, allowing the conflict to flare up again as new tensions arise.
While this might seem like a vicious cycle that will continue to repeat, Morgan says that one point of optimism is how middle power countries are stepping up to play a role in peace negotiations. He points to Pakistan and the UAE’s efforts to stabilize the Iran War during the second quarter of 2026. The UAE has also worked to support efforts to end conflict in Sudan and Russia’s aggression towards Ukraine.
“There is a reflection that because we’re in this crisis moment—the polycrisis moment is how people describe it—that there is an opportunity for Middle Power countries who traditionally didn’t have the geopolitical strategic influence to potentially join together to reinvigorate the multilateral system,” he explains. “That’s a bit more speculative, but I think at least there’s recognition of the moment and that there’s a need for it. That gives us a certain amount of optimism.”
For more analysis on conflict and terrorism, revisit our coverage of IEP’s 2026 Global Terrorism Index.
