Freedom from political violence

How this is measured

Two questions — how often state agents torture people, and how often they kill them — coded separately and averaged. It is about violence used by the state for political ends, so it says nothing about ordinary crime, and a country at war can score well if its own agents are not the ones doing this. Because it is coded by country experts and then put through a measurement model, every value is an estimate with a credible interval around it. V-Dem publishes those intervals; this site shows only the point estimate, so how firm any single number is cannot be read off the screen. The intervals are wider where fewer experts coded a country and in the earlier centuries, which is exactly where the long series is most tempting to read closely.

163 countries and territories have a figure for 2025. This is the most recent year the series covers well; the viewer holds every year from 1789.

Data by year

Source and licence

Other personal statistics