Top 20 Safest Countries

Iceland has held the top spot for well over a decade — it keeps no standing army and typically records single-digit homicides in a year. The most revealing pattern is that safety and wealth are not the same thing: Singapore, Malaysia and Bhutan all make the top 20, while far richer France and the United States sit outside the top 50. Scale is counterintuitive too: Japan reaches the top 12 with 123 million people, easily the most populous country on the list, where most other entries have fewer than 20 million. One caveat about method: the index penalises military spending, weapons exports and troops deployed abroad, so a heavily militarised country caught up in external conflict will rank low even when its domestic streets are safe.