Developments in impunity were defined by two fundamental forms of political contestation in 2024: elections and war. There was a notable uptick in unaccountable governance during this major electoral year.
Global and regional averages for conflict and violence remained relatively stable, but underlying raw data from key indicators point to a rise in levels of violence.
Munich, 14 February 2025—Eurasia Group and an expert advisory board released the third edition of the
Atlas of Impunity today at the Munich Security Conference. The Atlas is the first-ever comprehensive index tracking the abuse of power across five key dimensions: unaccountable governance, abuse of human rights, conflict and violence, economic exploitation, and environmental degradation.
The Atlas defines impunity as the exercise of power without accountability, built on 60 statistical indicators drawn from 24 validated sources. The data underpinning the Atlas are curated from independent and credible sources with annually updated statistics. Of the 170 countries ranked, Syria tops the 2024 Atlas of Impunity (the country where people face the most impunity ranks highest), with an overall score of 3.43, followed by Yemen and Myanmar. Finland is once again the top performer, followed by Denmark, Sweden, and several European countries, along with New Zealand.
The
2024 Atlas of Impunity takes a citizen-centric approach, putting a country's people at its core. The report's data for 2024 and its historical series have been revised to ensure that the figures included more clearly measure impunity as experienced by a country's residents.
In 2024, developments in impunity were defined by two fundamental forms of political contestation: elections and war. More than 70 countries held some form of national vote during the year, bringing more than 1.5 billion people to the polls worldwide.
Incumbents fared poorly in 2024's elections in the wake of inflationary shocks that squeezed households' purchasing power in wealthy and developing countries alike. In the US, the data show that citizens have experienced an increase of 0.17 points (from 1.06 to 1.23) in the unaccountable governance dimension over the last five years, starting well before the 2024 election. Since 2012, when the Atlas's time series began, the US score has risen from 0.93 to 1.23. Meanwhile, the effects of war in key hotspots have only deepened, with fighting ongoing in Ukraine, Sudan, Myanmar, and Yemen, and only a fragile cease-fire in place in Gaza.
Rather than pitting democracies against autocracies, the Atlas of Impunity uses the analytical framing of impunity versus accountability, which is nuanced and comprehensive enough to capture the multidimensional and interconnected nature of global challenges. This lens also highlights how impunity undermines democratic societies and how accountability can manifest in some ways in nondemocratic systems. Variations in impunity ultimately come down to politics, leadership, and policy choices.
The average impunity score of the 170 countries ranked in 2024 was 2.02, similar to the level recorded in 2021-2023. However, the global average masks some more interesting developments at the dimension level as well as persistently high levels of impunity in the countries involved in conflict. Moreover, despite the stability of the headline score, there is a greater degree of variation among the global averages of unaccountable governance, conflict and violence, and environmental degradation. By contrast, the global averages for environmental degradation and abuse of human rights have remained relatively steady.
As in previous years, most of the Atlas's dimension scores are strongly correlated with each other and with a country's GDP per capita. Environmental degradation remains the exception and is only weakly associated with overall impunity or income per head.
Other takeaways include:
- Syria tops the 2024 Atlas of Impunity with an overall score of 3.43 out of 5. Following 13 years of civil war, the fall of Bashar al Assad's regime in December 2024 offers Syrians hope for a new political process that stabilizes the country and restores accountability if further infighting can be averted.
- Some of the Atlas's most improved countries in 2024 provide further reasons for optimism. In Sierra Leone, where residents have seen the most improvement on these Atlas metrics since 2019, reduced violence and a series of reforms have greatly improved accountability. In Guatemala, the third-most improved country year-on-year, the election of anticorruption candidate Bernardo Arevalo in 2023 and the failure of authorities' efforts to keep him out of office or overturn the vote have underpinned greater accountability.
- In a major year for electoral politics, the Atlas recorded a notable uptick in unaccountable governance, both globally and in most geographic regions. This was largely driven by a series of indicators from the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) Democracy Index and the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) datasets. The scores are largely backward-looking, reflecting developments that took place in 2023 or the structural conditions against which 2024's elections unfolded rather than outcomes at the polls last year.
- A plausible interpretation of the unaccountable governance scores is that voters' mounting frustration with the political process contributed to the backlash against incumbents at the polls. The V-Dem scores also raise the prospect of a heightened risk of political violence in several regions.
- Global and regional averages on the conflict and violence dimension of the Atlas remained relatively stable in 2024, but underlying raw data from key Atlas indicators point to a rise in levels of violence. Much of this fighting is concentrated in a small number of countries and territories that have recorded high scores on this dimension for several years—which explains the stability of the global average.
Find the full report at
atlasofimpunity.com.
For requests on the index, methodology, or analysis, contact Eurasia Group at
[email protected].
Editor's note
The data used for this edition of the Atlas come from sources published through September 2024.
The Atlas scores more than 170 countries and territories on a 0-5 scale across the five dimensions of impunity. Higher overall scores denote greater impunity, with the Atlas ranking the worst performers at the top of the table. Twenty-seven of the countries or territories do not have sufficient data for a full score.
The Atlas project is chaired by an external, independent global advisory board composed of human rights experts and activists, former diplomats, and former government officials with a range of regional and policy perspectives. The Atlas was made possible through grants from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Open Society Foundations.
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