2026-08-25 · people

Violent death is rare globally — concentrated in pockets

Most people live in countries with low homicide rates. A few drive the average up.

Seven in ten people live in countries where homicide is rare; one in ten lives where rates run high — and pull the global average up. For most of humanity, violent death is an outlier; in a concentrated band of countries, it is a persistent risk. UNODC homicide data, grouped illustratively by homicide rate.

1 cell = 8.2 million people (0.1% of world population) · 1,000 cells

Context

The 2026 edition sorts countries into tertiles by UNODC homicide rate and weights them by population — an illustrative split, not an official UNODC classification. Low-rate countries hold about 70% of the world's 8.2 billion people, middle-rate countries 20%, and high-rate countries 10%.

UNODC's Global Study on Homicide goes beyond counts and rates, tracking who is killed and how — including victims killed by intimate partners or family members, by gangs and organized criminal groups, and during robberies.

Because high-rate countries hold only a tenth of humanity, global averages understate the risk inside those pockets and overstate it almost everywhere else — read the grid as a map of exposure, not a prediction for any individual.

UNODC homicide rate tertiles by population, illustrative.