2026-07-17 · people
Violent death is rare globally — concentrated in pockets
Most people live in countries with low homicide rates. A few drive the average up.
Your odds of dying by homicide depend overwhelmingly on where you live. Some 70% of the world's 8.2 billion people live in countries with low homicide rates, 20% in middle-rate countries, and just 10% in high-homicide countries. Violent death is rare for most of humanity — but heavily concentrated in a small share of it.
1 cell = 8.2 million people (0.1% of world population) · 1,000 cells
Context
The grouping draws on UNODC's Global Study on Homicide, which compiles homicide counts, rates, and time series across countries. Countries are sorted into low, middle, and high homicide-rate tertiles by population — an illustrative split that shows how unevenly lethal violence is distributed worldwide.
Beyond headline rates, UNODC tracks who homicide victims are and who kills them: the study breaks out killings by intimate partners or family members, by gangs and organized criminal groups, and during robberies, alongside the mechanism of death and homicide levels in major cities. It also compares male and female victimization.
Because most countries cluster at the low end, global averages understate the pockets where violence concentrates. Weighting by population rather than by country count makes that imbalance visible: a small share of humanity carries a disproportionate share of homicide risk.
UNODC homicide rate tertiles by population, illustrative.
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Credit this grid as Inagrid — https://inagrid.com/e/2026-07-17-homicide-rates